Few volumes of scholarly essays combine coherence of subject and quality of research as this one does. The articles are in dialogue with one another, implicitly if not always explicitly; they tackle big topics; they provide insightful analysis as well as a wealth of information. Half the authors have a connection with the University of York, and the book as a whole is a testimony to the intellectual power an interdisciplinary center can bring to bear on a research topic. The book considers all aspects of the medieval house/home/household: the physical layout of the buildings, their ownership, the objects located inside them, the things that people did in them, and the relationships among the people who lived in them.
Individually and together, the articles make the case for the importance of difference, even within a relatively narrowly defined region and time period. The difference between urban and rural, which we might expect to be important in housing needs, turns out to be, in fact, quite complicated. As Sarah Rees Jones argues (79), the same people might own both urban and rural estates. Jane Grenville challenges recent scholarship that has argued that urban housing was quite different from rural. The hall form, whether in a manor house or a peasant cottage, allowed for the expression of hierarchy (in either the height of the seats or proximity to desirable parts of the room) and for surveillance of the household; she claims, on the basis of detailed analysis of rural and urban buildings, that the persistence of the hall in towns was not pragmatic but rather a way of expressing continuity with “conservative patriarchal power structures” (118). P. J. P. Goldberg finds rural and urban differences, however, in the types of possessions that are found in household inventories: among people of comparable wealth, “bourgeois society placed greater value (culturally and economically) on household goods whereas peasant society prioritised land, livestock and the working tools these required” (130).
Another important axis of difference is time. Felicity Riddy identifies a change from the early fourteenth century in the arrangement of bourgeois houses from one or two rooms to four or five, which allowed the allocation of activities to different spaces. It was not just a difference in size but a difference in way of life, based on the values of orderliness and differentiation. There was at least an attempt to attain privacy (an attempt, paradoxically, recognized by prosecutions under the assize of nuisance by people who disrespected it by peeking in). Rees Jones looks at another shift, the change to the timber-framed house in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The separate occupancy and separate ownership of houses on different housing plots, which she identifies after 1250, supports the same sort of domestic values that Riddy identifies slightly later.
Rees Jones also discusses another area of difference, the ways in which different social groups used space (whether through their own planning or through what was available to them). She identifies a dichotomy between the hall house of the burgess and the smaller homes of less wealthy urbanites and stresses the importance of written title for owners (as opposed to tenants) in the demarcation of hierarchy. Riddy, too, finds status difference crucial. Her comparison of the bourgeois house with the peasant's or urban worker's one- or two-room cottage is telling. Grenville argues that unlike the wealthier people who retained the hall form, the urban poor had a new distinctive form of housing.
Like Rees Jones, Mark Gardiner integrates textual and material culture, using archeological evidence and household inventories to argue that the way of arranging service rooms in the typical medieval house plan had more than just a pragmatic importance. There was a “basic, deep-rooted idea about separating items connected with drink from those associated with table-setting” (46), which goes back at least to the twelfth century. Food and drink had a deep symbolic importance that, he suggests, may be related to Eucharistic piety and perhaps also to humoral theory that distinguished the wet from the dry. The latter seems a bit far-fetched, but the former is entirely persuasive.
Gardiner's Eucharistic discussion indicates that religion was far from absent from secular households. Mary Erler, too, argues that the popularity of the feast of the Visitation created a “spirituality of the visit” (269) in which laypeople visited one another to discuss spiritual matters. Isabel Davis argues that William Langland's use of the biblical figure of Abraham in Piers Plowman is an attempt “to negotiate a dignified, if tragic, place for wedlock within late-medieval society” (231). Marilyn Oliva demonstrates that monastic houses, too, need to be considered as domestic spaces. She finds that the domestic furnishings of nunneries are comparable to those of the lesser gentry and suggests that the nuns “consciously created a continuum of sacred/domestic space” (160).
Like Goldberg's article, Janet Loengard's reveals how household objects can tell a story: she discusses the items that widows might expect to retain after their husbands’ deaths, apart from their “paraphernalia” (a small amount of clothing and personal items). Despite the common law of coverture that made all of a woman's property her husband’s, in practice testaments reveal that widows did retain the right to dispose of their clothing and at least some jewelry and that married women often were given or bequeathed and allowed to keep other household items. Nicole Nolan Sidhu also provides an optimistic reading of late medieval women's position, arguing that Chaucer's version of the Griselda story in his “Clerk's Tale” is aimed at laymen, to teach them successful domesticity (with Walter's treatment of Griselda as a negative example), rather than at women, to teach them submission. Nicola McDonald carefully examines a manuscript, the Brome commonplace book, to argue that the dice game Have Your Desire creates a place in which it was permissible for women to speak transgressive desire. Anyone interested in late medieval society and culture will find much worth reading in this book.
