Shakespeare, Vermeer, Lope de Vega, Molière, and Diderot dont usually keep company with one another. But in this acclaimed book, Richard Helgerson shows that each contributed to a common project of great significance: the artistic promotion of the middle-class home. In a study that stretches over two centuries, Helgerson looks beneath European drama and painting to reveal an unexpected prehistory of modern domesticity.

Richard Helgerson is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Elizabethan Prodigals and Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System, as well as Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, which won the British Council Prize in the Humanities and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.