To be labeled “of ill repute” in medieval society implied that a person had committed a violation of accepted standards and had stepped beyond the bounds of permissible behavior. To have a reputation ...“of good repute”, however, was so powerful as to help a person accused of a crime be acquitted by his or her fellow peers. Labeling a person in medieval times was a complex matter. Often, unwritten codes of behavior determined who was of good repute and who was not. Members of the nobility committing a “fur-collar crime” might have considerable leeway to oppress their neighbors with violence and legal violations; however, a woman caught without appropriate attire and without the proper escort hazarded the label of a “woman of ill repute.” Gender, class, social statutes, wealth, connections, bribes, friends, and the community all played a role in how quickly or how permanently a person’s reputation was damaged. ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’ examines the complex social regulations and stigmatizations that medieval society used to arrive at its decisions about condemnation and exoneration. In eleven interrelated essays, including three previously unpublished works, Hanawalt explores how social control was maintained in Medieval England in the later Middle Ages. Focusing on gender, criminal behavior, law enforcement, arbitration, and cultural rituals of inclusion and exclusion, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’ reflects the most current scholarship on medieval legal history, cultural history, and gender studies. It looks at the medieval sermons, advice books, manuals of penance, popular poetry, laws, legal treatises, court records, and city and guild ordinances that drew the lines between good and bad behavior. Written in a lively, accessible, and jargon-free style, this text is essential for upper level undergraduate history courses on medieval history and women’s history as well as for English courses on medieval literature.
London became an international center for import and export trade in the late Middle Ages. The export of wool, the development of luxury crafts and the redistribution of goods from the continent made ...London one of the leading commercial cities of Europe. While capital for these ventures came from a variety of sources, the recirculation of wealth through London women was important in providing both material and social capital for the growth of London's economy. A shrewd Venetian visiting England around 1500 commented about the concentration of wealth and property in women's hands. He reported that London law divided a testator's property three ways allowing a third to the wife for her life use, a third for immediate inheritance of the heirs, and a third for burial and the benefit of the testator's soul. Women inherited equally with men and widows had custody of the wealth of minor children. In a society in which marriage was assumed to be a natural state for women, London women married and remarried. Their wealth followed them in their marriages and was it was administered by subsequent husbands. This study, based on extensive use of primary source materials, shows that London's economic growth was in part due to the substantial wealth that women transmitted through marriage. The Italian visitor observed that London men, unlike Venetians, did not seek to establish long patrilineages discouraging women to remarry, but instead preferred to recirculate wealth through women. London's social structure, therefore, was horizontal, spreading wealth among guilds rather than lineages. The liquidity of wealth was important to a growing commercial society and women brought not only wealth but social prestige and trade skills as well into their marriages. But marriage was not the only economic activity of women. London law permitted women to trade in their own right as femmes soles and a number of women, many of them immigrants from the countryside, served as wage laborers. But London's archives confirm women's chief economic impact was felt in the capital and skill they brought with them to marriages, rather than their profits as independent traders or wage labourers.
Beginning with the merger of Roman, Christian, and Germanic cultures, this history of the Middle Ages covers a vast array of subjects including Byzantium and the Islamic world, feudalism, Church ...reform, architecture, the Crusades, courtly love, the Magna Carta, and the Hundred Years' War. Author Barbara A. Hanawalt uses a lively and anecdotal writing style to bring history alive for young readers. She delves into the telling details that young adults find fascinating such as the different kinds of armor and weapons used by knights on horseback and the terrifying spread of the Black Death through Europe in the 14th century. Lavishly illustrated with art, photographs, documents, artifacts, and maps, The Middle Ages also includes an index and suggestions for further reading.
When Barbara Hanawalt’s acclaimed history The Ties That Bind first appeared, it was hailed for its unprecedented research and vivid re-creation of medieval life. David Levine, writing in The New York ...Times Book Review, called Hanawalt’s book “as stimulating for the questions it asks as for the answers it provides” and he concluded that “one comes away from this stimulating book with the same sense of wonder that Thomas Hardy’s Angel Clare felt : ‘The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.’” Now, in Growing Up in Medieval London, Hanawalt again reveals the larger, fuller, more dramatic life of the common people, in this instance, the lives of children in London. Bringing together a wealth of evidence drawn from court records, literary sources, and books of advice, Hanawalt weaves a rich tapestry of the life of London youth during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Much of what she finds is eye opening. She shows for instance that--contrary to the belief of some historians--medieval adults did recognize and pay close attention to the various stages of childhood and adolescence. For instance, manuals on childrearing, such as “Rhodes’s Book of Nurture” or “Seager’s School of Virtue,” clearly reflect the value parents placed in laying the proper groundwork for a child’s future. Likewise, wardship cases reveal that in fact London laws granted orphans greater protection than do our own courts. Hanawalt also breaks ground with her innovative narrative style. To bring medieval childhood to life, she creates composite profiles, based on the experiences of real children, which provide a more vivid portrait than otherwise possible of the trials and tribulations of medieval youths at work and at play. We discover through these portraits that the road to adulthood was fraught with danger. We meet Alison the Bastard Heiress, whose guardians married her off to their apprentice in order to gain control of her inheritance. We learn how Joan Rawlyns of Aldenham thwarted an attempt to sell her into prostitution. And we hear the unfortunate story of William Raynold and Thomas Appleford, two mercer’s apprentices who found themselves forgotten by their senile master, and abused by his wife. These composite portraits, and many more, enrich our understanding of the many stages of life in the Middle Ages. Written by a leading historian of the Middle Ages, these pages evoke the color and drama of medieval life. Ranging from birth and baptism, to apprenticeship and adulthood, here is a myth-shattering, innovative work that illuminates the nature of childhood in the Middle Ages.
The working women in this volume represent a wide diversity of stations in life, ranging from slaves and servants to respectable widows and professional midwives. Through a variety of sources ...including notarial records, wills, contracts, private account books, and city, manorial, and state court records, their work patterns come to life. The women studied lived in Page viii →Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Florence, Lyon and Montpellier, Exeter and rural England, Cologne, Leiden, and Nuremberg. With such a variety of work experiences, locations, and centuries separating their lives, a remarkable continuity of circumstances and options nevertheless emerges.
The second half of the twentieth century saw an increased interest in childhood and its history. Many factors influenced the historical study of childhood. The popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis ...and Piaget's studies of child development played a large role. The appearance of such books as Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther inspired new historical biographies that included childhood influences on great men's lives. Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood and the development of social and cultural history in the 1970s moved the study of childhood away from the more individual, introspective approach toward a discussion of general childrearing practices. The inspiration to study childhood, however, was also connected to a new generation of historians in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to write the history and experiences of people who had previously been omitted from history books: children, women, ethnic and racial groups, immigrants, peasants, and laborers. With the aid of computers, historians were able to reconstruct demographic patterns that included children as well as adults. The study of these social groups in literature was aided by the move away from the canon to include more popular literary texts. The intersection of social/cultural history and literature also moved literary historians to study women, children, and other groups. Art historians responded critically to Ariès's rather superficial use of artistic representations of children. One of the great advantages that medievalists have had is that scholars from different disciplines read each other's work, thereby enriching fields of medieval studies, including that of childhood. Medievalists have been doing cultural studies long before it became trendy.
In writing medieval social and cultural history I have studied groups of people who, for the most part, could not read or write: peasants, criminals, children, and women. In this article, I have ...taken a difficult group of illiterates to read, the poor of medieval London. Even among those people in the Middle Ages who could write, recording personal experiences was extremely rare. Communication in the Middle Ages was largely oral and only when something went wrong and came into courts or when someone had the foresight to have an agreement written down do we have a record of these people. As in my other studies of the Middle Ages I have used a variety of legal records that informed me about those instances when recourse to law was necessary. The scraps of information in court records yield an odd picture of the world. The information is fragmented and people usually appear with no social context, no family history, and no subsequent appearance.