| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Design in Early Modern Britain & Early America. By John E. Crowley. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiv, 361 pp. $42.00, ISBN 0-8018-6437-2.)

In this fascinating book, John E. Crowley leads the reader on a tour through several centuries of change in Anglo-American material culture. It begins with a description of hall houses and open hearths during the Middle Ages in England and accelerates through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with a discussion of courtesy books and the gradual installation of chimneys and glazed windows. Crowley then grounds us in the "Great Rebuilding" of the English landscape from 1560 to about 1640, a period that opened the process of transformation of Britain's standard of living toward greater comfort with greater numbers of commodities and witnesses the initial expansions of the Tudor-Stuart empire to North America. 1

Crowley's study is riveting for different reasons. His mastery of the literatures of cultural history, architectural history, and decorative arts allows him to digress with precision and imagination on chimney design in courtly palaces and common houses, hearth size, and debates about flue direction; candlesticks and the metal-casting techniques that reduced their cost over the eighteenth century; the function of looking glasses for self-imaging in both religious and domestic contexts; why Benjamin Franklin and Count Rumford were so intrigued by stoves; and the interplay of domestic ideologies during the 1830s and 1840s between Catharine Beecher and Andrew Jackson Downing. . . .

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