What is the Student Salon?
Or lo! The Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,
The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round.
…At once they gratify their Scent and Taste,
While fragrant Cups prolong the rich Repast.
Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712)
In Alexander Pope’s satiric verses, extravagance and wit suffuse a moment as seemingly ordinary as pouring a cup of coffee. The spaces where ladies gather become a battle ground, enlivened by the crunch of grinding beans, the swirl of the mill, and the lustre of porcelain cups. These objects are vital to the life of the poem. It is an object, a lock of hair, that sparks the mock heroic tale in the first place.
In the summer of 2025, Susannah Lyon-Whaley and I received funding from Inclusive-Learning@York for a project that would explore the connection between salon objects and literary culture in 17th and 18th-century England. How did tobacco or chinaware enter into early modern conversation and literature? What did elite women know of the global origins of these goods, and of the systems of labour and knowledge that contributed to their presence in an English interior? We wanted to approach these questions from a decolonial perspective, and in accordance with the initiatives encouraged by the Inclusive Learning team. This included building a project that involved student-staff co-construction of curriculum content, notably reading lists and case studies, to reflect different perspectives and experiences, and building in case studies with ‘a more diverse/global range of topics’. Given the nature of our topic, we also wanted to lean into the material culture aspect of our investigation. In a digital age, where images are endlessly replicated on our screens, we wanted to bring authentic historical objects from the early modern period into spaces of study on campus.
What is a Salon?
The literary salons of the 17th and 18th centuries provided spaces where women and men engaged in cosmopolitan intellectual culture within the home. First appearing in Italy in the 16th century, these salons flourished in France in the 17th century, and gained traction in England in the 1630s with the arrival of the French queen consort Henrietta Maria to Charles I’s court. Though salon-style gatherings had existed in the Tudor era, Stuart salons were increasingly formalized according to Continental fashions, by patronesses who provided spirited wit, intellectual challenges, and financial support to a network of writers, artists, scientists, political philosophers, and musicians. By the Restoration, expatriates and English courtiers in London met in the distinguished Mazarin salon, led by two French exiles, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and Charles de Saint-Évremond.
The material culture of the parlour connected patrons and guests to many different parts of the world. To reach the rooms of a literary gathering in an estate or town house, one might pass painted staircases made of Caribbean wood, Chinoiserie wallpaper, and birdcages filled with bright-feathered macaws from South America. Though associated with European literary culture, salons were prevalent in places such as India (see the TIDE: Salon project) and Japan (see the British Museum’s Salon culture in Japan). Goods such as coffee had long been a beverage used in fashionable gatherings in the Ottoman Empire before they migrated to Stuart London. Meanwhile, as Simon Gikandi explored in Slavery and the Culture of Taste, salons and wider cosmopolitan culture relied on transoceanic systems of labour, enslavement, and colonialism. Items such as sugar bowls and silver spoons indicate a fascination with foreign tastes, but they also connected those who purchased and held such objects to the lives of enslaved Africans on Caribbean sugar plantations, or to the Indigenous and African silver miners and refiners in what is now Bolivia.
Drawing on Eugenia Zuroski’s 2020 article, ‘Where Do You Know From?’, Student Salon encourages us to ask: where did these things, and the knowledge associated with them, come from? Whose perspectives and agencies were represented in the literature and objects of the salon? Can objects introduce other perspectives and ways of knowing into the salon? And finally, how might this influence how we teach English literature?
The Cabinet Unlocked
Our funding allowed us to research these questions while assembling a historic cabinet of our own. Working with our three student partners, Mumia Douse-Bah, Daisy Glassett-King, and Rachel Hogue, we spent several weeks scouring auction sites and antique shops. Eventually, we settled on a small Dutch cabinet (c. 1740) with variously-sized compartments that captured something of early modern cabinets of curiosities, which were often present in the rooms where salons were held. Over the ensuing days, we compiled a list of objects we hoped to see in the cabinet. Our longlist included brocaded fabrics, snippets of wallpaper, porcelain tea caddies, keys, and even a white silk embroidered wallet. After many conversations, we settled on those objects that you can now find in our cabinet and its accompanying catalogue, which we hoped would demonstrate a range of object types and geographical places. Little by little, 400-year-old silver spoons and fine 18th century sugar bowls trickled into Derwent College.
What can cinnamon or a cowrie shell bring to researching and teaching? Each one of us on the project might offer a different answer. From sparking creative responses that might illuminate Renaissance ideas of the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical, to prompting new approaches to materiality and literary innovation in the ‘it-narratives’ or novels of circulation in the eighteenth century, we hope these objects can provoke new insights into the study of consumption and sociability, plays and poetry. A whiff of cinnamon or nutmeg from an apothecary jar might conjure the smells of spiced chocolate poured into porcelain cups; introducing the page on cinnamon and its place of origin from the botanist John Gerard’s Herbal (1597) alongside this then invites a considering about how women might have traced cinnamon bark to the East Indies and merchant competition. Around the time that the eccentric Gerard was completing his book of plants, Shakespeare alluded to this global traffic for spices in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For Titania, Queen of the Faeries, the movement of luxury goods are inseparable from human migrations. Titania refuses to give up the ‘Indian’ boy in her care, for:
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side…
Her womb then rich with my young squire, –
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise…
And for her sake do I rear up her boy.A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 1
When we showcased the cabinet to groups of students in July 2025, most agreed that a high point of the session was the opportunity to handle historic objects. The stories they unlocked were ‘affecting’, ‘inspiring’ and even ‘shocking’.
Our cabinet, or portable salon, can be used in pedagogical and creative projects on campus for years to come. If you need further inspiration, our webpage contains a range of resources that relate to the cabinet, and to early modern salon culture. Here, you will find a full catalogue of our salon objects; some suggestions for incorporating the cabinet into the curriculum; blogs on salon objects and literary sociability; and a reading list that explores our topic from more global, decolonial perspectives. You can follow project information on Bluesky with #StudentSalon.
Lauren Working is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of York.