Well-being Past and Present

The History and Contemporary Practice of a Cultural Phenomenon in Britain

Siobhan Hyland, Paul Jackson, Mark Rothery

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350499850
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this exciting interdisciplinary volume, researchers, archivists, curators and social scientists offer a fresh exploration of the concept of well-being in Britain throughout history and in the present day.

Well-being Past and Present examines the various ways well-being has been invoked as a concept or term throughout historical periods, attending to its multifarious meanings and its significance on the way we live our lives. Focusing on the interactions between historical research and heritage and archival methods and practices, the volume bridges the gap between historical experiences of well-being and contemporary well-being interventions by institutions and communities.

Across sixteen chapters the authors in Well-being Past and Present travel from the battlefield to the library, the orchard to the archive, and the country house to the hospital ward, examining well-being's own historical and contemporary position in discourses like leisure, health and happiness.

The key questions this volume asks are: has the concept of well-being become too nebulous to carry any real meaning? What happens to the term when we place it in the range of very different contexts that it finds a home in? How do past discourses of well-being connect to the present? How widely is well-being and associated activities spread across our diverse societies?

Well-being Past and Present is a timely volume and contributes not just to our historical understanding of well-being but how we can utilise history and heritage to establish communities of care in Britain.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Well-being past and present
• 1 ‘Mindfulness and the mise-en-page’: Women, well-being and the medieval book of hours
• 2 ‘In this orchard, when you would be comforted’: Using garden spaces for familial intimacy and well-being in late medieval England
• 3 ‘In your well-being is cheife felicity’: Physical, social and emotional health in seventeenth-century family letters
• 4 ‘The only place that can heighten my enjoyment of my friends’: Well-being at Wrest Park in the mid-eighteenth century
• 5 ‘Showing feelings’: Exploring and exhibiting women’s well-being and emotion in the English country house
• 6 Ecotherapy at Abington Park Museum: Lessons from the history of well-being
• 7 Women, welfare and well-being: Philanthropy in the Northamptonshire boot and shoe industry
• 8 A panacea for wounds and panic: Tobacco, alcohol and well-being on the Western front during the First World War
• 9 Well-being from the perspective of community groups: Notes from Abington Community Library, 1939–2023
• 10 Well-being in mental health nurses’ working lives and its impact on nursing shortages: Insights from the early years of the National Health Service
• 11 ‘Caring archives’: Well-being challenges in an archive of extremism – Lessons and questions from a decade of the Searchligh Archive
• 12 Can heritage places change visitor subjective well-being?
• 13 ‘Art power’: Creative workshops and social justice in the museum
• 14 ‘Why we are not all going on a summer holiday?’ An examination of barriers to ethnic minority participation in leisure activities and domestic tourism in the UK
• Index