Material Knowledge and Material Culture: The Silver Furniture of Louis XIV (1666—1689), (2018-current)

Christina Clarke
Funding: Endeavour Research Fellowship, Australian Department of Education, 2018

How can we gain a true understanding of historical material culture which no longer exists? Is there a way to comprehend the materiality of objects once they are gone? This project aims to reconstruct the materiality of one such group of objects—the lost silver furniture of Louis XIV—by identifying the craft processes that were used to make them. This material reconstruction is achieved by gathering the scant data on these pieces which survives in accounts and inventories and analysing these with the implicit knowledge of metal—the material knowledge—gained from experience in the craft.

This research for this project was undertaken during a fellowship at the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford and was funded by an Endeavour Research Fellowship awarded by the Australian Department of Education in 2018. The main outcomes of this project will be a journal article and a monograph.

Current Outcomes:

• Blog post: “Metalwork in the Encyclopédie: critical interpretation and the evidence of material culture,” Voltaire Foundation Blog, 15 January, 2019, https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/metalwork-in-the-encyclopedie-critical-interpretation-and-the-evidence-of-material-culture/.
• Conference paper: “The Manufacturing Network of Louis XIV’s Silver Furniture,” Furniture History Society Symposium: British, Continental, and American Furniture and Interiors, The Wallace Collection, London, 22 November 2019.