The Paradox of Body, Building and Motion in Seventeenth-Century England: Rethinking Art's Histories

From the early-seventeenth-century house with its staccato physical and social rhythms to the late-seventeenth-century house with its long vistas and changeable wall surfaces, owners and guests moved through spatial complexes increasingly intertwined in networks of circulation. Arguments across philosophy, poetry, and etiquette manuals reveal the inherent human malleability and mobility assumed by designers of these spaces, while books on colonisation, travel, and geography highlight the broader networks of motion in which early modern viewers lived. The spaces of house and estate, analyzed here through a guest's eyes and mind, correspondingly evoked yet disciplined circulation to transform the blur of motion paradoxically into a foundation for social and mental stability. In the early decades of the century, motion - whether literal travel or floating abstract signifiers - had been alternately feared and praised, but, from mid-century and particularly in the wake of the English Civil War, authors regrounded the comprehensibility of even language itself in motion and architectural theorists rethought both book and building into a sequence of shifting phases that immobilised an innately restless viewer. With its blend of visual and textual analysis, this book will be of interest to art, architectural, and cultural historians of early modern Europe as well as to other readers exploring the history of European visual culture.