"Shakespeare, Vermeer, Lope de Vega, Moliere, and Diderot don't usually keep company with one another. This new book - Richard Helgerson's first since the highly acclaimed Forms of Nationhood - shows that each contributed to a common project of enormous significance: the artistic promotion of the middle-class home. In a study that stretches over two centuries and four countries, Helgerson unearths the shared preoccupations of European domestic drama and painting.

The result is an unexpected prehistory of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cult of domesticity."--BOOK JACKET.