The shop, the home, and the retail revolution: Antwerp, seventeenth-eighteenth centuries

In this article probate inventory sources are used to shed new light on the interior of early modern shops and shop-design. Focusing on Antwerp, a provincial town in the Southern Netherlands, we question what defined the identity of the shop, and analyze shop-specific goods of Antwerp homes for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It appears how shop designing schemes were not essential for eighteenth-century retailing of novelties and fashionable goods. Lavish and well-furbished shops are more likely to be a proxy of an ‘urban renaissance’, rather than a revolutionary change within retailing.