Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (review)

Medieval Domesticity emanates from Fordham University's twenty-fifth annual medieval conference, held in 2005, co-sponsored with the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, UK, and York's Medieval Household Research Group. Usefully framed by Maryanne Kowaleski's and Jeremy Goldberg's introduction, the essays show the centrality of the domestic to all aspects of English medieval life — from social relations to material life, politics, religion, and the economy. Underpinning the research here, thanks largely to the nexus created by the York Medieval Household Research Group, is true interdisciplinarity.

One theme emerging from this essay collection is the cultural work performed by ideas about the household in later medieval English society and politics. Several essays explore the development between 1200 and 1500 of new household forms and ideologies connected particularly with the more substantial urban dwellers — a "bourgeois" domesticity distinctive from that governing the peasantry, the aristocracy, the clergy, or even the poorer inhabitants of the towns. Felicity Riddy's opening essay, "'Burgeis' Domesticity in Late-Medieval England," argues that the merchant ethic — marked by pride in civic status, considerable wealth and property, and ambition driven by industry, craftsmanship, and skill — dominated the urban centres and had become an important counterpoint to aristocratic wealth and power by the later fourteenth century. New ideologies, however, often generate cultural anxiety: in "On the Sadness of Not Being a Bird: Late-Medieval Marriage Ideologies and the Figure of Abraham in William Langland's Piers Plowman," Isabel Davis sees a moment in the late fourteenth century when the new bourgeois ideologies are under challenge. Examining the textual revisions between the B-text and C-text versions of Piers Plowman on the treatment of marriage, Davis sees an initially positive treatment of the new bourgeois ethic on marriage give way in the C-text revision to a more traditional clerical privileging of chastity and virginity. In "Weeping for the Virtuous Wife: Laymen, Affective Piety and Chaucer's 'Clerk's Tale'," Nicole Nolan Sidhu argues that the target audience of Chaucer's version of the immensely popular Griselda story was the same group of substantial bourgeois men whom Riddy describes, and their evident attraction to the tale lay not in the almost impossibly patient and passive Griselda as female role model, but in the cruel Walter as anti-model, who exemplified all that the late medieval Christian bourgeois should not be.

Other essays treat domestic ideologies in other aspects of late medieval English life, in each case complicating our understandings of the medieval household. Mary C. Erler's "Home Visits: Mary, Elizabeth, Margery Kempe and the Feast of the Visitation" examines the English manifestation of the new fifteenth-century feast of the Visitation, which celebrated Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth while both were pregnant. The integration of Christian devotional life and the family visit provides a means of understanding the immanence of religious life in the domestic. Janet Loengard's essay, "'Which may be said to be her own': Widows and Goods in Late-Medieval England," considers the relationship between ideology and practice in the developing conceptualization of the marital economy. Loengard looks closely at the divergence between the stark letter of the common law on married women's ownership of chattels and the more nuanced reality that wives and widows were seen to be entitled to a range of personal goods (minimally clothes, girdles, bedclothes, and often much more). Nicola McDonald similarly problematizes the role of ideology in the unfolding of household relationships. In "Fragments of (Have Your) Desire: Brome Women at Play," McDonald examines the "Brome book," a commonplace book of the later fifteenth century, which includes amidst its devotional texts and do-it-yourself legal formulae a number of fragments of dicing games, puzzles, and short poems that reveal the gentle household as a venue for playful heterosexual interaction. McDonald argues that even overtly misogynistic word-puzzles must be seen as ludic rather than straight, as playful...