Le château au quotidien : les travaux et les jours

The material culture of castles, of their inhabitants, chatelains, house servants, or guests, presents multiple sides from the Middle Ages to the 19^th century. Analyses gathered an exemplary documentary variety to highlight their social and temporal differences with a promising complexity. What stands out is that it is necessary to link dwellings to their local integration and to resituate the latter in a characteristic opening and mobility. The regional and general network of castles with its differentiated establishments would account for the stages of density, the progress and steps back – because there were moments when castles were abandoned while others lived again. These movements put them in a global, social and cultural dynamic. The shortages of material consumption and the demography of the very objects are the background to a movement that leads castles from necessity to material comfort et from the latter to a new necessity rooted in the privatisation of spaces and the expansion of comfort which itself became a need. The space of everyday life, the world of trivial things, and the material culture of the castle changed in one millennium depending on the evolution of social relations modes, sociability, and the rise of autonomy.