Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350-1558 (review)

Reviews 113 approach casts the Renaissance as a monolithic bloc instead of showing it as a period of flux. Where five images of the baptism of Christ are arranged together it is to highlight the subject matter, rather than to point out the stylistic and technical differences as art history would do. The authorial voice is not so much absent as transposed from the text to the structure. Despite the publisher's claim that this is a 'completely new and thoughtprovoking exploration', the novelty lies in the arrangement of material rather than the content. Readers will be aware of various illustrated surveys of the Renaissance, from John Hale's Time-Life Renaissance (1965), recent editions of Burckhardt, and Toman's The Art of the Italian Renaissance (Konemann, 1995) to Jardine's Wordly Goods (Doubleday, 1996) and Hale's Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (HarperCollins, 1993). For comprehensiveness rather than personal interpretation, Hale's Encyclopaedia ofthe Italian Renaissance, also with Thames and Hudson (1981) remains an intelligent, usable and text rich resource. For quality and exhaustiveness of fine-art illustration, it is difficult to go past Hartt's History of Italian Renaissance Art, again with Thames and Hudson (4th ed., 1994). The strength of Panorama lies in the sheer number and variety of its illustrations. It is most suited as a visual resource book, for scholars or students, while still being light and small enough to hold and browse. It is less strong on literature, both in using it as a source and in its description thereof, though Aston herself avers that 'the Renaissance was in its origins, and remained always at heart, a literary movement'. Max Staples Charles Sturt University Bainbridge, Virginia R., Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350-1558 (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion 10), Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1996; cloth; pp. xii, 177; 3 maps; R.R.P. £32.50. Today, popular belief tends to see the medieval gilds as the forerunners of the modern trade union movement. That is, gilds were associations of craftspeople or merchants w h o banded together for primarily economic advantage. One recent gild historian, Heather SwansOn, has focused on these craft gilds, describing their relationship with the municipal governments, but concluding that their religious and social functions were of most importance to their members. In this study, Virginia Bainbridge investigates the religious and social gilds, specifically analysing the gilds of medieval Cambridgeshire from about 1350 to 1558, by which date they had been abolished. The major fourteenth-century source for this study is the royal survey of gilds from 1388-9, along with some surviving returns in answer to a royal writ requiring gilds to describe their customs, the authority for their existence and 114 Reviews their possessions. It is disappointing that, although further returns have been found in the P R O since a history written in 1919, these have not always been used: for example, M a p 2, showing the geographical distribution of returns, is based on the earlier listing. Bainbridge has, however, usefully compared the returns with the fourteenth-century poll-tax returns and 1327 Lay Subsidy, to enable her to estimate, for example, the size of community (equal to 100 taxpayers) necessary to support a gild. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, wills provide most evidence, although Bainbridge also utilises parish records, government surveys (tax and disestablishment records) and a set of gild accounts from 1514-37. Bainbridge initially shows h o w the concentration of gilds was related to the geography of a region. The varying geography of Cambridgeshire affected not only agriculture and settlement patterns, but also the local administrative units. Where parishes were large and sparsely populated, free chapels came into being and with them greater participation in gilds. It is a commonplace that the number of gilds andfraternitiesincreased in Europe after 1350. Rather than attributing this increase only to the Black Death, Bainbridge follows other scholars in suggesting that this increase began in the twelfth century in response to alienation from close-knit communities following the development of towns. In particular, a new source of charitable support and assistance with burial was required. Greater...