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."
RSS Feed