Joanne Bailey and Angela McShane's blog posts on the uses of bedchambers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are definitely worth checking out. One important observation: "The bed could hold different meanings at different times for different individuals because it was so intimately bound up with the form and function of the household. ... So a bed had different meanings according to whether a wife shared the marital bed with a female servant due to her husband's absence, or when she lay with her husband. It changed again when it was given over to child care or nursing the sick."
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