At Home in the Early Modern Dutch Dollhouse

Dollhouses were a notable outlet for women in the Netherlands as collectors during the 17th and 18th centuries. This book explores the material culture of the dollhouses as displays, shedding light on new concepts of domesticity, the reception of household goods, and the agency of female collectors.

Seven extant Early Modern Dutch pronk (luxury) dollhouses provide material evidence of how these cabinets elevated the domestic world as a subject. The dollhouse as a format for these collections goes beyond didactic meanings to incorporate haptic performance, games, displays of commodities, and global goods that reflect the home as a site of knowledge production and commerce and to emphasize the role of women in assembling goods for the home. Close analysis of dollhouses in cultural and theoretical contexts situate the women who assembled them within broader histories of collecting.

The book is aimed primarily at a scholarly audience in humanities fields such as art history and material culture, architectural studies, the history of interiors, and the study of domesticity, but is also accessible to interested general readers.