Virtual Shakespearean Parlour Room
Interactive game (downloadable) and web tour
Ready to discover the 1600s yourself? Middling Culture has created a truly immersive virtual tour – the Shakespearean Memory Parlour.
This is a state-of-the-art, meticulously reconstructed ‘virtual’ parlour, designed as an interactive game.. It is typical of the kind of space that would have been familiar to middling individuals (such as Shakespeare). Through it, we can learn about the sorts of objects and activities that shaped the experiences, imagination and creativity of people from the middling ranks of society.
Exhibition
Virtual exhibition
Here, we curate a series of images and items that capture the everyday lives of England’s “middling” people—neither the very rich nor very poor—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Our exhibition is divided into themes, which reflect the key areas that defined these individuals and their worlds. Each object emerges from our research and has links with some of the key case study communities at the heart of our project. Together, they mark out what distinguishes the “middling” from the aristocratic gentry or from the very poorest in society.
Each of our themes has a brief overview to introduce them and then a series of items with object descriptions. Click on one of the themes to discover more. You can also range between different or connected items.
Social Status Calculator
Survey and quiz tool
What status or role might you have held in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries? What might a character from a play or an individual you are tracing in the archive have thought of themselves: a wealthy gentleman, a household servant, a well-to-do carpenter, or a struggling writer? Take our calculator tool to discover historical status, and explore our full breakdown of our early modern status categories (with example individuals and documents)…
BLog Posts and Insights
Blog
Discover the range of the project’s research on our blog’s index page: our posts cover insights from the archives, new research discoveries, accessible discussions of different forms of early modern media, ways to use our resources, and a wealth of guest posts from researchers and practitioners.
Talk on Everyday life in early modern England
Recorded talk by PI Prof. Catherine Richardson
Listen to project principle investigator Prof. Catherine Richardson on why researching early modern England’s middling sort is essential for understanding how creativity and culture affect social mobility.
Middling Culture 