Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Trade Review'One final note in favor of this volume is the frequency of cross-references between the essays: Burger’s essay makes good use of Kuipers’s argument, Seaman cites Burger, Critten cites Radulescu, etc. These connections not only strengthen the volume’s coherence, but make a good case for the household as meaningful field of study.'
Studies in the Age of Chaucer
'Glenn Burger and Rory Critten’s well-edited collection gives new dimension to topics often associated either with medieval universities or the royal household...The underlying question of medieval practicality stands to be the core of important future work for which this collection, with its range of theoretical and historical approaches and effective footnotes, is an intelligent and well-rounded resource.'
Arthuriana
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Table of Contents1 Introduction: the home life of information – Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten
2 Knowledge production in the late-medieval married household: the case of Le Menagier de Paris – Glenn D. Burger
3 Knowing incompetence: elite women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower – Elliot Kendall
4 Renovating the household through affective invention in manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 – Myra Seaman
5 The Christmas drama of the household of St John’s College, Oxford – Elisabeth Dutton
6 Household song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale – Sarah Stanbury
7 Field knowledge in gentry households: ‘pears on a willow’? – Nadine Kuipers
8 Domestic ideals: healing, reading, and perfection in the late-medieval household – Michael Leahy
9 Macrocosm and microcosm in household manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 – Raluca Radulescu
10 The multilingual English household in a European perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the traffic of texts – Rory G. Critten
Index
