Energy and the functional specialisation of domestic space in eighteenth-century Ghent and Leiden : the early modern home as an ' energyscape'

Daily activities were now not only allocated more and more to the home but differentiated into separate domestic spaces for leisure, sleeping, sociability, dining, preparing meals and so on. In this chapter, the author will study the interaction between energy and the spatial arrangements of (bourgeois) homes in the eighteenth-century Low Countries based on a selection of probate inventories from two central cities: the Flemish city of Ghent and the Holland city of Leiden. Throughout the long eighteenth century, the relative number of heated and illuminated kitchens in Ghent and Leiden easily rose to 90% or more. The domestic energy transition also depended on consumer preferences, everyday customs and of course the household's ability to invest in it. This is evident when many stoves in the Ghent and Leiden inventories were recorded as being stored in attics, as it was not uncommon for households to banish the comfortable but ugly stove to the upstairs quarters of the home in spring.