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widows may have class interests or political interests, which they defend, but they are also subject to categories of gender which interacted with their other identities. The importance of multiple identities in twelfth-century culture has 2 introduction recently been investigated by Ian Short, who argues that the AngloNorman English sought to maintain a sense of cultural distinctiveness, and in so doing they perpetuated a sense of social exclusiveness.6 This model of self-definition thus unconsciously draws on elements of closure theory to explain increasing twelfth
way the intervention of that government might affect their lives. The surviving records cover twelve counties in England: Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Middlesex. Women from all ranks of the landholding classes are represented in the rolls relating to the twelve counties surveyed: from the twice widowed Margaret duchess of Brittany and countess of Richmond and sister of the Scottish king, who is listed as holding land worth £55 2s and eight marks per
noblewomen and power 7 Seals Representation, image and identity here are over 145 extant secular women’s seals from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.1 They present the historian with unique opportunities to study the portrayal of female identity in twelfth-century England. Seals were visual representations of power, and they conveyed notions of authority and legitimacy. They publicly presented a view of both men and women which visibly crystallised ideas about gender, class and lordship. The modern historian of seals owes a considerable debt to
-emphasised the mutuality between parties, that is, between donor(s) and beneficiary, could be symbolic and were usually voluntary.2 This approach is similar to that of Barbara Rosenwein, who stressed the relationships between donors which were created when gifts were exchanged.3 Dominique Barthélemy argues that social class was exhibited when precious objects such as gold rings were exchanged.4 Stephen White also argues that the social context of gift exchange is important because countergifts were tangible expressions of specific social hierarchies and served to define the
power and portrayal 2 Power and portrayal lthough the twelfth century is often presented as a ‘Golden Age’ of English historical writing, few historians have discussed the portrayal of twelfth-century women. An important exception, Marjorie Chibnall’s study of women in Orderic Vitalis, is valuable for the way it explores Orderic’s presentation of noblewomen according to their marital status, class and wealth.1 Essentially, Chibnall agreed with Eileen Power that the image of women in literature was complex and reflected the place of women in society generally.2
–7 above. 18 Tabuteau states that for Norman churches the length of a witness list was not a particular concern – practice varied from church to church – and that neither rank nor class made an individual suitable to witness: Transfers of Property, p. 156; Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, p. 159; J. Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (London: Longman, 1996), p. 42. 19 Mowbray Charters, p. lvii, where the lord’s family were supplemented by members of the household, knights and those who held
This collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives emerge.
This collection of nine new chapters investigates how the late medieval household acts 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 established work on the noble and royal ‘great household’, as well as on materialist historiography on rural and bourgeois domestic life, Household Knowledges considers bourgeois, gentry, and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. Arguing that the relationship between the domestic experience and the forms assumed by that experience’s cultural expression is both dynamic and reciprocal, the chapters in this volume address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, agricultural and estates management literature, devotional and medical writing, household music and drama, and manuscript anthologies. Contributors develop a range of methodologies, drawing on insights generated by recent manuscript scholarship as well as on innovations in affect theory and object relations theory; their chapters reconsider the constitution of the late-medieval urban and gentry home by practices of writing and reading, translation and language use, and manuscript compilation, as well as by the development of complex object–human relations and the adaptation of traditional gender and class roles. Together, the studies compiled in Household Knowledges provide a fresh illustration of the imaginative scope of the late medieval household, of its extensive internal and external connections, and of its fundamental centrality—both as an idea and a reality—to late-medieval cultural production.
? Stereotypes of social class, especially alleged rusticity, also abounded in connection with ID. The medieval peasant often was an object of contempt and derision to his contemporaries, described as rough, dirty, boorish and foolish. One may note here the image of the ‘stupid’ peasant, referring to the entire class of peasants, not just individuals, as being mentally less able than their social superiors. ‘Peasants were supposed to be stupid, an enduring image of the countryman common across boundaries and time.’ 104 Boorish , of course, is the adjective pertaining to the
defence of their own territories along the frontier, their military acumen was a key determinant of their wider success or failure. The growth of seigniorial households and affinities was in part a result of the increasing demands of medieval warfare, made more necessary for the Lacys by the collateral administration of their transmarine interests. The necessary personnel was supplied by the emerging knightly class whose members were also courted by the king of England. No study of aristocratic lordship in this period can ignore the impact of expanding royal lordship