This thesis investigates elite and genteel women’s production and consumption of material objects in Britain during the period 1750-1830. Each of its four chapters identifies a central process that characterised these engagements with material culture, focusing on ‘Migration,’ ‘Description,’ ‘Translation,’ and ‘Exchange’ in turn. The Introduction examines each of these with regard to the historiography of eighteenth-century material culture and its relationship with gender, social relations, domesticity, and materiality. It argues that by viewing material culture through the lenses of microhistory and the case study, we might gain a sense not only of how individual women acquired, used, and conceived of objects, but also how this related to the broader processes by which material culture functioned during this period. Chapter 1 identifies the importance of needlework in the construction of prescribed feminine identities, and focuses on representations of needlework in portraiture, genre prints, and conduct literature. The chapter argues that such objects created a ‘grammar’ of respectable domestic femininity that migrated through visual, literary, and material genres, reflecting the permeability of cultural forms during this period. Chapter 2 examines the role of description in the journals and correspondence of the travel writer Caroline Lybbe Powys, concentrating on her 1756 tour of Norfolk. Following the work of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the chapter argues that the ‘thick description’ that characterises Lybbe Powys’s accounts of domestic visiting and tourism locates both the homes of her hosts and her own epistolary practices within an interpretative framework of hospitality, sociability, and materiality in which description was central. Chapter 3 considers the interior decoration of A la Ronde, the home of the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, located in Exmouth in Devon. The chapter argues that the processes of translation that characterised the Parminters’ acquisition and display of their collection of souvenirs transformed these objects both physically and semantically, allowing the cousins to co-opt them into personal narratives, redolent of travel, the home, and the family. Chapter 4 focuses on Plas Newydd, the home of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. It examines how the gift exchange enacted at the house facilitated the creation of ‘gift relationships,’ which both reflected and constituted the connections between Butler and Ponsonby, their numerous friends and visitors to their home, between Plas Newydd and the surrounding landscape, and between material culture, experience, and sentiment, more broadly. Together, the constituent chapters of the thesis demonstrate that there was no simple connection between gender and material culture. However, by interrogating the key cultural processes in which this relationship operated, the thesis hopes to demonstrate the complexity and fluidity of its manifestations.

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High Entropy Alloy (HEA) is a class of construction steels based on the mixing of five or more elements in approximately equimolar ratios. Despite the ambiguity of their future use, HEAs represent a significantly new group of construction materials that are currently receiving a great deal of attention. Single-phase HEAs fail when used at elevated tempera-tures. The improvement of their high-temperature resistance was achieved by introducing a dispersion of oxides Al2O3 and Y2O3. To generalize the positive effect of dispersions on the mechanical properties at elevated temperatures, particles of a similar nature were cho-sen. These were dispersed particles of nitrides: hardness-incompatible AlN and hardness-compatible BN. The particles were evenly distributed inside the alloys by mechanical al-loying and compacted by SPS (Spark Plasma Sintering). The new structural alloy reached a density higher than 96.5 % and brought an increase in yield strength at room tempera-ture of up to 67 % and 40 % at elevated temperatures, while maintaining a homogeneous distribution of input powders.