In his mid-sixteenth-century Essays Michael Eyquem de Montaigne conceptualised privacy as individual solitude and associates it with a space: a reserved ‘store-house’ that is entirely for ‘our selves’. His chapter ‘On Solitude’ suggests that a private space might be difficult to recognise in a residence, because it would not necessarily have consistent characteristics by which it could be identified. The spatial placement of privacy, as Montaigne states, was not stationary. Montaigne continues that having chosen ‘treasures … that may be freed from injurie’, a man should ‘hide them in a place where no one can enter, and which cannot be betraied but by our selves’. Montaigne's treasures were intangible possessions – one's own thoughts – that would be immune from theft so long as the self was secure; but private spaces in residences, it will be shown in this chapter, were used to secure valuable objects too.

Modern literature addressing privacy is wide-ranging and complex, and it is important to bear in mind that authors tend to write with their own personal and culturally specific definition of privacy in mind. Orest Ranum, studying Samuel Pepys's house in London, argued that ‘no matter how rich or how poor, how young or how old, human beings create around them a space that is uniquely theirs … [t]he amount of private space may be very small, but there is some privacy and sense of recognition of that privacy by others.’ Here Ranum makes a case for an almost primordial need for privacy. Matthew Johnson ascribes two transitions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the increased desire for privacy: first, the move out of the great hall by the elite family; and, second, the advent of the status of the individual at the point when developments in the Protestant faith supported the removal of the priest as an intermediary and when an inward-facing faith with a focus on private, personal devotion was encouraged.