Medieval Households

Medieval Households PDF Author: David HERLIHY
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How should the medieval family be characterized? Who formed the household and what were the ties of kinship, law, and affection that bound the members together? David Herlihy explores these questions from ancient Greece to the households of fifteenth-century Tuscany, to provide a broad new interpretation of family life. In a series of bold hypotheses, he presents his ideas about the emergence of a distinctive medieval household and its transformation over a thousand years. Ancient societies lacked the concept of the family as a moral unit and displayed an extraordinary variety of living arrangements, from the huge palaces of the rich to the hovels of the slaves. Not until the seventh and eighth centuries did families take on a more standard form as a result of the congruence of material circumstances, ideological pressures, and the force of cultural norms. By the eleventh century, families had acquired a characteristic kinship organization first visible among elites and then spreading to other classes. From an indifferent network of descent through either male or female lines evolved the new concept of patrilineage, or descent and inheritance through the male line. For the first time a clear set of emotional ties linked family members. It is the author's singular contribution to show how, as they evolved from their heritages of either barbarian society or classical antiquity, medieval households developed commensurable forms, distinctive ties of kindred, and a tighter moral and emotional unity to produce the family as we know it. Herlihy's range of sources is prodigious: ancient Roman and Greek authors, Aquinas, Augustine, archives of monasteries, sermons of saints, civil and canon law, inquisitorial records, civil registers, charters, censuses and surveys, wills, marriage certificates, birth records, and more. This well-written book will be the starting point for all future studies of medieval domestic life.

Medieval Households

Medieval Households PDF Author: David HERLIHY
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
How should the medieval family be characterized? Who formed the household and what were the ties of kinship, law, and affection that bound the members together? David Herlihy explores these questions from ancient Greece to the households of fifteenth-century Tuscany, to provide a broad new interpretation of family life. In a series of bold hypotheses, he presents his ideas about the emergence of a distinctive medieval household and its transformation over a thousand years. Ancient societies lacked the concept of the family as a moral unit and displayed an extraordinary variety of living arrangements, from the huge palaces of the rich to the hovels of the slaves. Not until the seventh and eighth centuries did families take on a more standard form as a result of the congruence of material circumstances, ideological pressures, and the force of cultural norms. By the eleventh century, families had acquired a characteristic kinship organization first visible among elites and then spreading to other classes. From an indifferent network of descent through either male or female lines evolved the new concept of patrilineage, or descent and inheritance through the male line. For the first time a clear set of emotional ties linked family members. It is the author's singular contribution to show how, as they evolved from their heritages of either barbarian society or classical antiquity, medieval households developed commensurable forms, distinctive ties of kindred, and a tighter moral and emotional unity to produce the family as we know it. Herlihy's range of sources is prodigious: ancient Roman and Greek authors, Aquinas, Augustine, archives of monasteries, sermons of saints, civil and canon law, inquisitorial records, civil registers, charters, censuses and surveys, wills, marriage certificates, birth records, and more. This well-written book will be the starting point for all future studies of medieval domestic life.

The Good Wife's Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris)

The Good Wife's Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris) PDF Author:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
In the closing years of the fourteenth century, an anonymous French writer compiled a book addressed to a fifteen-year-old bride, narrated in the voice of her husband, a wealthy, aging Parisian. The book was designed to teach this young wife the moral attributes, duties, and conduct befitting a woman of her station in society, in the almost certain event of her widowhood and subsequent remarriage. The work also provides a rich assembly of practical materials for the wife's use and for her household, including treatises on gardening and shopping, tips on choosing servants, directions on the medical care of horses and the training of hawks, plus menus for elaborate feasts, and more than 380 recipes. The Good Wife's Guide is the first complete modern English translation of this important medieval text also known as Le Ménagier de Paris (the Parisian household book), a work long recognized for its unique insights into the domestic life of the bourgeoisie during the later Middle Ages. The Good Wife's Guide, expertly rendered into modern English by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, is accompanied by an informative critical introduction setting the work in its proper medieval context as a conduct manual. This edition presents the book in its entirety, as it must have existed for its earliest readers. The Guide is now a treasure for the classroom, appealing to anyone studying medieval literature or history or considering the complex lives of medieval women. It illuminates the milieu and composition process of medieval authors and will in turn fascinate cooking or horticulture enthusiasts. The work illustrates how a (perhaps fictional) Parisian householder of the late fourteenth century might well have trained his wife so that her behavior could reflect honorably on him and enhance his reputation.

The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, C. 850-c. 1550

The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, C. 850-c. 1550 PDF Author: Cordelia Beattie
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble households were defined as agents of government in the administration of local communities. Many of the papers therefore address the public functions and perceptions of the household, and argue that the formulation of domestic (and family) values was of essential importance in the growth and development of the medieval Christian state. Contributors to this volume of collected essays write from a number of disciplinary perspectives (archaeological, art-historical, historical, and literary). They examine socially diverse households (from peasants to kings) and use case-studies from different regions across Europe in different periods from the medieval epoch from c.850 to c.1550. The volume both includes studies from archives and collections not often covered in English-language publications, and offers new approaches to more familiar material.It is divided into thematic sections exploring the role of households in the exercise of power, in controlling the body, in the distribution of wealth and within a wider economy of possessions. The majority of the papers were first given at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 2001, in a strand on 'Domus and Familia' organised by the Urban Household Group of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York.

The Great Household in Late Medieval England

The Great Household in Late Medieval England PDF Author: C. M. Woolgar
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300076875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In the later medieval centuries, a whole range of important social, political and artistic activities took place against the backdrop of the great English households. In this vividly illuminating book, C. M. Woolgar explores the details of life in these great houses. Based on an extensive investigation of household accounts and related primary documents, he examines the daily routines, the weekly and annual patterns, and the life-cycle observances of birth, childhood, marriage, death and burial. He also delineates the major changes that transformed the economy and geography of both lay and clerical households between 1200 and 1500.

Objects of affection

Objects of affection PDF Author: Myra Seaman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526143836
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book’s pages – human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible – collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript’s material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.

Medieval Gentlewoman

Medieval Gentlewoman PDF Author: Ffiona Swabey
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415925112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"Through an examination of Alice's "Household Book," and using other extant contemporary sources, the author has been able to illuminate the experiences of medieval women in general. The resulting work provides a vivid picture of life in the medieval household, examining marriage and widowhood, daily household and estate management, hospitality and entertainment, education, patronage, religious concerns and the private and public roles of medieval women of the estate-owning class."--BOOK JACKET.

Visualizing Household Health

Visualizing Household Health PDF Author: Jennifer Borland
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091487
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Régime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Régime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household. Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Régime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland focuses on several illustrated versions of the manuscript that contain historiated initials depicting simple scenes related to health care, such as patients’ consultations with physicians, procedures like bloodletting, and foods and beverages recommended for good health. Borland argues that these images provide important details about the nature of women’s agency in the home—and offer highly compelling evidence that women enacted multiple types of health care. Additionally, she contends, the Régime opens a window onto the history of medieval women as owners, patrons, and readers of books. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book broadens notions of the medieval medical community and the role of women in medieval health care. It will be welcomed by scholars and students of women’s history, art history, book history, and the history of medicine.

Medieval Families

Medieval Families PDF Author: Carol Neel
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802084583
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The collection reveals how scholars of the 1970s through the 1990s argued the importance of previously unconsidered questions about the shape of medieval familial experience, and how their mutual information and criticism has refined and added to this investigation in the intervening period.

Legal Plunder

Legal Plunder PDF Author: Daniel Lord Smail
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737288
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
As a Europe grew rich in the Middle Ages, the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of households often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers kept goods in circulation, and sergeants of the law marched into debtors’ homes to seize belongings equal in value to debts owed. David Smail describes a material world on the cusp of modern capitalism.

Family and Household in Medieval England

Family and Household in Medieval England PDF Author: Peter Fleming
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 0333610792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Family and Household in Medieval England discusses the history of family life in England from c. 1066 to c. 1530, drawing upon both primary sources and a wide range of secondary literature. After a discussion of the family in theory and law from late classical times, the book traces the development of the family in this period by following a "life-cycle" approach, from marriage, through childbirth, to the dissolution of marriage by death or separation.