Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollhouses*

Early modern prescriptive literature about household spatial and social ordering primarily informs us of elite male views. Few contemporary sources exist to suggest women’s notions about these issues. Early modern dollhouses could shed some light on the views of both sexes, as makers, patrons, and collectors of such objects. Such artefacts have rarely been considered a source for historic perceptions of households and family in scholarly analyses. In particular, by interpreting the meanings of extant structures, their furnishings, dolls, and surrounding documentation produced by the elite Dutch women who created and collected them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an important female-oriented vision of the idealised early modern household emerges.