Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France

Glenn D. Burger, Rory G. Critten

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526144232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: the home life of information
• 2 Knowledge production in the late-medieval married household: the case of Le Menagier de Paris
• 3 Knowing incompetence: elite women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower
• 4 Renovating the household through affective invention in manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1
• 5 The Christmas drama of the household of St John’s College, Oxford
• 6 Household song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale
• 7 Field knowledge in gentry households: ‘pears on a willow’?
• 8 Domestic ideals: healing, reading, and perfection in the late-medieval household
• 9 Macrocosm and microcosm in household manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38
• 10 The multilingual English household in a European perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the traffic of texts
• Bibliography
• Index