Medieval Households

Medieval Households
Author: David HERLIHY
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674038606
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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 Families

Medieval Families
Author: Carol Neel
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780802084583
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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.

The Ties that Bound

The Ties that Bound
Author: Barbara A. Hanawalt
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195045642
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Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

Medieval Family Roles

Medieval Family Roles
Author: Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1999
Genre: Families
ISBN: 0815336632
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First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Baronial Family in Medieval England

A Baronial Family in Medieval England
Author: Michael Altschul
Publisher:
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1965-12-20
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN:
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Originally published in 1965. In A Baronial Family in Medieval England: The Clares, 1217–1314, Michael Altschul studies the Clare family during the thirteenth century. The Clares spearheaded the struggle to enforce Magna Carta in the Barons' War. Historians prior to Altschul tended to neglect the Clares' history given the scattered nature of the archives documenting their time as a politically influential and powerful family. This book unfolds chronologically, outlining the Clares' rise to preeminence and describing how they administered their estates and income.

Those of My Blood

Those of My Blood
Author: Constance Brittain Bouchard
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2010-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 081220140X
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For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed. One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies. While the general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood," not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women conceptualized and structured the family unit changed markedly over time. Focusing on the Frankish realm between the eighth and twelfth centuries, Constance Brittain Bouchard outlines the operative definitions of "family" in this period when there existed various and flexible ways by which individuals were or were not incorporated into the family group. Even in medieval patriarchal society, women of the aristocracy, who were considered outsiders by their husbands and their husbands' siblings and elders, were never completely marginalized and paradoxically represented the very essence of "family" to their male children. Bouchard also engages in the ongoing scholarly debate about the nobility around the year 1000, arguing that there was no clear point of transition from amorphous family units to agnatically structured kindred. Instead, she points out that great noble families always privileged the male line of descent, even if most did not establish father-son inheritance until the eleventh or twelfth century. Those of My Blood clarifies the complex meanings of medieval family structure and family consciousness and shows the many ways in which negotiations of power within the noble family can help explain early medieval politics.

Women, Family, and Society in Medieval Europe

Women, Family, and Society in Medieval Europe
Author: David Herlihy
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571810243
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Until his untimely death in 1991, David Herlihy, Professor of History at Brown University, was one of the most prolific and best-known American historians of the European Middle Ages. Author of books on the history of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, Herlihy published, in 1978, his best-known work in collaboration with Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles (Translated into English in 1985, and Italian in 1988). For the last dozen or so years of his life, Herlihy launched a series of ambitious projects, on the history ofwomen and the family, and on the collective behavior of social groups in medieval Europe. While he completed two important books - on the family (1985) and on women's work (1991) - he did not find the time to bring these other major projects to a conclusion. This volume contains essays he wrote after 1978. They convey a sense of the enormous intellectual energy and great erudition that characterized David Herlihy's scholarly career. They also chart a remarkable historian's intellectual trajectory, as he searched for new and better ways of asking a set of simple and basic questions about the history of the family, the institution within which the vast majority of Europeans spent so much of their lives. Because of his qualities as a scholar and a teacher, during his relatively brief career Herlihy was honored with Presidencies of the four major scholarly associations with which he was affiliated: the Catholic Historical Association, the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America,and the American Historical Association.

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

The Good Wife's Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris)
Author:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801461960
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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.

Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages

Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
Author: Frances Gies
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2019-07-22
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780062966810
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From bestselling historians Frances and Joseph Gies, authors of the classic "Medieval Life" series, comes this compelling, lucid, and highly readable account of the family unit as it evolved throughout the Medieval period--reissued for the first time in decades. "Some particular books that I found useful for Game of Thrones and its sequels deserve mention. Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City, both by Joseph and Frances Gies." --George R. R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones Throughout history, the significance of the family--the basic social unit--has been vital. In Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, acclaimed historians Frances and Joseph Gies trace the development of marriage and the family from the medieval era to early modern times. It describes how the Roman and barbarian cultural streams merged under the influence of the Christian church to forge new concepts, customs, laws, and practices. Century by century, the Gies follow the development--sometimes gradual, at other times revolutionary--of significant components in the history of the family including: The basic functions of the family as a production unit, as well as its religious, social, judicial, and educational roles. The shift of marriage from private arrangement between families to public ceremony between individuals, and the adjustments in dowry, bride-price, and counter-dowry. The development of consanguinity rules and incest taboos in church law and lay custom. The peasant family in its varying condition of being free or unfree, poor, middling, or rich. The aristocratic estate, the problem of the younger son, and the disinheritance of daughters. The Black Death and its long-term effects on the family. Sex attitudes and customs: the effects of variations in age of men and women at marriage. The changing physical environment of noble, peasant, and urban families. Arrangements by families for old age and retirement. Expertly researched, master historians Frances and Joseph Gies--whose books were used by George R.R. Martin in his research for Game of Thrones--paint a compelling, detailed portrait of family life and social customs in one of the most riveting eras in history.