Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

As recent exhibitions, historical novels, and scholarly ventures amply demonstrate, the early modern home is a hot topic. The early modern Dutch home, whose order and disorder were so frequently thematized by seventeenth-century artists, holds special appeal. The well-tempered maintenance of this arena, largely occupied by women and children, has drawn huge audiences at recent museum shows. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century dollhouses—replicas in miniature of stately Dutch homes, replete with copies of actual furnishings—in such collections as the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, are a high point of most visits. Within the scholarly realm, the domestic arena represented so frequently and compellingly by painters has undergone an important shift: whereas, a century ago, the interiors and activities depicted were held to comprise so many records of daily life, recent studies by Martha Hollander, Simon Schama, and Mariet Westermann, among others, view the Dutch home as a space constructed by way of such pictures, which in their views articulate social, civic, political, and gender relations. Schama's influential The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Seventeenth Century (1987), for example, holds that the Dutch home was a microcosm of the Dutch Republic, and the cultivation of the domestic arena was one way of carrying out civic duties. Such active interest in the lineaments of home and its meanings should only amplify the impact of Richard Helgerson's rich, nimble, and far-reaching study of early modern representations of the home.

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