Objects, Environment, and Everyday Life in Medieval Europe by ed. Ben Jervis Lee G. Broderick and Idoia Grau Sologestoa (review)

Most of the thirteen essays in this collection were originally presented in a session of the 2012 Medieval Europe Research Congress in Helsinki, entitled ‘Life in the City: Artefact and Environmental Based Approaches to Urban Europe’. There is ‘a diverse chronological and geographical range’ (p. 2), but it is worth noting that the collection leans very heavily towards artefacts and environmental evidence found in the British Isles or in Scandinavia.

Unlike the conference proceedings and specialised journals that they have largely replaced, collections of essays, particularly when published as volumes in thematic series, impose upon their editors the need to make a case for the unity of the collection; to give a convincing rationalisation for its structural subdivisions; to summarise the contribution to the discipline made by the essays, individually and collectively; and to gesture towards their larger implications and wider significances. In these circumstances, a certain amount of hyperbole is inevitable, but technically considered, the Introduction provided by Ben Jervis and his co-editors is exemplary.

The essays included in Objects, Environment, and Everyday Life in Medieval Europe are highly detailed, specialist analyses, surprisingly readable for the most part, and, as far as a non-specialist can judge, of consistently high quality. To a greater or lesser extent, the contributors contrive, chiefly in their opening and closing paragraphs, to address one or more of the key themes or issues that the Introduction raises. The focus on urban sites and urban cultures which originally brought the contributors together at the 2012 Helsinki conference is not reflected in the title of this volume. But it is the fundamental unifying rationale of the collection as described in the Introduction, and this focus is pervasively reflected in the essays. A particular aim, heralded in the Introduction and developed in a variety of ways by a number of the contributors, is to challenge preconceived ideas of a ‘hard rural/urban dichotomy’, and to consider towns ‘not as isolated settlements, but as integral parts of the system which was Medieval society, which influence their surroundings, but are also influenced by them’ (p. 12).

No less important as a thematic focus is the study of ‘Everyday Life’ in medieval urban culture, which, the Introduction affirms, ‘extends beyond the physical entity of the town’ (p. 2). According to the Introduction, it is ‘widely acknowledged’ that artefacts and environmental evidence can contribute to our understanding of ‘social relationships, identities, and processes of socio-cultural change’. But, the Introduction goes on to state, in relation to medieval towns, artefacts and environmental evidence are ‘an underutilized resource’ (p. 2). Maciej Trzeciecki, however, in an essay notable for the carefulness and sophistication of its methodology, addresses the question of ‘whether it is possible to reconstruct social relations on the basis of the surviving elements of material culture’. He describes this as a ‘fundamental question within archaeology’ (p. 114). He foregrounds the role of written sources, and regards interdisciplinary co-operation, particularly between archaeologists and historians, as a prerequisite for ‘attempting to construct a coherent image of life in a Medieval town’ (p. 133).

The Introduction also states that ‘relationships between people and objects within the Medieval home’ are, comparatively speaking, ‘understudied’ (p. 10). Janne Harjula, on the other hand, regards this relationship as ‘having recently been given much attention in archaeological research’, and adds that ‘material culture and its engagement with personal religious devotion and magical practices have been of particular interest’ (p. 212). Harjula’s essay, like the three runically inscribed bowls on which he bases his admirably brief, readable, and scholarly investigation, offers ‘valuable insight into the relationships between material culture and magical concepts, Christian devotion, and religious literacy education’ (p. 228). Harjula assumes, reasonably, that the three bowls were used...