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A Cultural History of Twin Beds challenges our most ingrained assumptions about intimacy, sexuality, domesticity and hygiene by tracing the rise and fall of twin beds as a popular sleeping arrangement for married couples between 1870 and 1970. Modern preconceptions of the twin bed revolve around their use by couples who have no desire to sleep in the same bed space. Yet, for the best part of a century, twin beds were not only seen as acceptable but were championed as the sign of a modern and forward-thinking couple. But what lay behind this innovation? And why did so many married couples ultimately abandon the twin bed?In this book, Hilary Hinds presents a fascinating insight into the combination of beliefs and practices that made twin beds an ideal sleeping solution. Using nuanced close readings of marriage guidance and medical advice books, furnishing catalogues, novels, films and newspapers, this volume offers an accessible and rigorous account of the curious history of twin beds. This is vital reading for those with an interest in cultural history, sociology, anthropology and psychology.

Beds --- Social aspects. --- History. --- Beds and bedsteads --- Bedsteads --- Bedroom furniture --- Applied arts. Arts and crafts --- History of civilization --- twin beds --- history [discipline]

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A Cultural History of Twin Beds challenges our most ingrained assumptions about intimacy, sexuality, domesticity and hygiene by tracing the rise and fall of twin beds as a popular sleeping arrangement for married couples between 1870 and 1970. Modern preconceptions of the twin bed revolve around their use by couples who have no desire to sleep in the same bed space. Yet, for the best part of a century, twin beds were not only seen as acceptable but were championed as the sign of a modern and forward-thinking couple. But what lay behind this innovation? And why did so many married couples ultimately abandon the twin bed?In this book, Hilary Hinds presents a fascinating insight into the combination of beliefs and practices that made twin beds an ideal sleeping solution. Using nuanced close readings of marriage guidance and medical advice books, furnishing catalogues, novels, films and newspapers, this volume offers an accessible and rigorous account of the curious history of twin beds. This is vital reading for those with an interest in cultural history, sociology, anthropology and psychology.

Beds --- Beds. --- History.

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What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism? This book explores how the Light Within became the organising principles of this seventeenth-century movement, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine. Taking an original perspective on this most enduring of radical religious groups, it combines literary and historical approaches to produce a fresh study of Quaker cultural practice. Close readings of George Fox's Journal are put in dialogue with the voices of other early Friends and their critics to argue that the ‘light within’ set the terms for the unique Quaker mode of embodying spirituality and inhabiting the world. This study of the cultural consequences of a bedrock belief shows how the Quaker spiritual self was premised on a profound continuity between sinful subjects and godly omnipotence. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature and history, but also to those concerned with the Quaker movement, spirituality and the changing meanings of religious practice in the early modern period.