Lena Cowen Orlin: Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 369. Cloth £ 55.00.

• Catherine Richardson

“Neighbor Parry,” said Elizabeth Roberte, “take heed what you say, for there is one in Pyckeringe’s window that writeth all that you speak.” [195] Lena Orlin’s book is rooted in such rich documentary sources for the material nature of daily interaction, but it has a dual focus. It begins its narrative with the arresting portrait previously known as Lady Ingram and Her Two Boys, a wonderfully tangible image, almost hyper-real in its representation of the materiality of middling daily life. On the one hand, Orlin calls her book an ‘accidental biography’ of this ‘obscure’ woman (actually Alice Barnham, wife of a Sheriff of London and Master of the Drapers’ Company), compiled from ‘institutional records’. So chapters 1, 3, 5 and 7 trace the family history of the Barnhams, giving a necessarily partial and fractured biography of this woman of middling status in relation to her husband Francis. The intervening chapters follow an argument about ‘material privacy’ which offers a rich context for this mercantile life; or equally the particular story of the Barnhams explores the general questions of privacy from a different perspective. These interleaved histories outline the major debates about the Great Rebuildings of the Tudor period, in which houses gained many more rooms and larger numbers of goods; they focus on halls, boundaries, galleries and closets in the search for particular kinds of privacy.

Seiten 420 - 422

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