Staging heat and light. Living practices and indoor environments during the early modern period

The use of heat and light in early modern buildings was an integral part of how houses functioned and were inhabited. Despite the importance of these aspects of housing in people's daily lives, the role they played in the dwellings of the time is a surprisingly little explored field.

In the project “Staging Heat and Light”, we investigate the use of heat and light in houses and how this interacted with and affected dwelling, everyday life and social practices during the early modern period.

The project is expected to provide new knowledge about how heat and light worked and interacted to – consciously or unconsciously – create different indoor climates and light environments in the houses from a long-time perspective. Our approach is to investigate both elite houses and more modest buildings to provide a broad and multifaceted picture of the conditions that different social classes had to shape their living environments.

We also hope that the work will be a catalyst for future more comprehensive studies of people's relationships to light and heat in housing – during other periods and in different contexts – and thus open up for broader research on housing where both dwellings and residents are put in focus.

The project has its origins in discussions within the ongoing interdisciplinary project HASP – Houses and Social Practices in Swedish Cities 1600–1850 and will be carried out in close collaboration with it.

Our project combines building archaeological investigations with objects in museum collections and a variety of written material. This allows us to analyse heat and light from a spatial perspective and in relation to the inhabitants in a detailed way, and at different levels of scale – from the warmth of the bed to the houses as a whole.

The main questions are:

• How have heat and light been used in relation to spatial structure and to how different spaces have been used?
• What sources of heat and light have been used where, and for what purposes?
• How was the indoor climate taken into account in the design of different rooms?
• How has this changed over time, and how does it interact with other changes that can be observed in dwellings and living practices?
• What differences do we see in the use of light and heat between buildings representing different social strata?

The study is conducted through five thematic sections that address different parts of the questions.

Theme 1: Power over the heat. Regulating indoor climate and degrees of habitability

House building in the early modern period was often dynamic and characterized by several technological innovations, such as the development of methods to retain heat and make heating more energy efficient and fireproof. A range of different systems and combinations of them often operated side by side or in succession to best control the indoor climate for different purposes.

This theme examines how heating systems such as fireplaces, tiled stoves and iron stoves were used not only to control heat in different ways according to different needs, but also to maintain social status and control and thus different comfort zones via heat.

Theme 2: Tile and iron stoves: mobile, reused and forgotten. A contextualized history of heat

Heat in early modern houses was not built around static, unchanging installations. It was natural for tile and iron stoves to be rebuilt or replaced when they became obsolete, regardless of the social position of the residents. But there are also examples of installations being moved around in the same building or rented out or sold for reuse in other houses. The heat sources may then have ended up in secondary or tertiary contexts, which is of great importance for chronological and stylistic interpretations.

Here we discuss how different sources of heat were used, reused, rented and sold and thus ended up in completely new contexts and what this means for the interpretation of the structure of early modern houses but also for the understanding of social practices and approaches to the consumption of heat.

Theme 3: Practices of sleep and night in relation to heat and light

As humans, we need a certain amount of warmth at night for our survival. The step from there to what we consider an acceptable or even comfortable sleeping temperature varies, not least depending on cultural and personal preferences.

Influences on the sleeping environment include the spatial structure and design of the home and how sleeping was organized. This has also influenced the use of lighting, partly as an effect of an increased division of dwellings into more rooms. With more windows in the houses, both light and drafts furthermore became a bigger problem than before in the bedrooms.

This theme examines the material culture of sleeping in relation to the design and heating of homes and rooms. How has the furnishing and design of bedrooms changed over time, in relation to heat and light?

Theme 4: Light and furnishings in a merchant's home in the 1840s

New light sources and fuels were experimented with in the 18th and 19th centuries. Both the design of the windows and the use of lighting show that the early modern approach was very different from that of earlier times. At the same time, all forms of lighting still relied on fire in various forms. The use of lighting was costly and required supervision. When the evening came, it got dark – but not always and not in all rooms.

This theme addresses questions like: How was light used, and by whom? How was the home furnished and decorated in relation to what the different rooms were used for and to light and lighting? What role did the use of light and heat play in social interaction and as a social manifestation?

Theme 5: Keeping warm and organising lighting with simple means

As the population grew in the 19th century and people moved to the cities, the pressure on housing increased. The shortage of housing and increased overcrowding probably meant that more and different spaces than before were used as housing. At the same time, more modern housing ideals had taken root. Many homes were built to a higher standard, not least in terms of heating and lighting.

The dissonance between simple housing and new housing ideals is explored here. How did poor households relate to heat and light?