Civic Community in Late Medieval Lincoln: Urban Society and Economy in the Age of the Black Death, 1289–1409 by Alan Kissane (review)

There has been considerable debate and constant scholarship devoted to the developments surrounding the fourteenth century which, on the basis of the interest of much of that historiography, can be convincingly termed "the age of the Black Death." Alan Kissane's recent monograph, Civic Community in Late Medieval Lincoln: Urban Society and Economy in the Age of the Black Death, 1289-1409, is set squarely within these debates with particular attention to the English context, while arguing against the more schematic traditional view of urban decline. Kissane argues that such conceptions, though a somewhat useful reflection of the upheavals of the time, often obscured the potential variety of communal responses to the subsequent crises. He uses the city of Lincoln as a case study to understand how the civic government dealt with the issues of the period to keep the economy of the city going and to solidify the social bonds that undergirded their community. Although his study is somewhat restricted—given his primary focus on Lincoln, albeit with some comparison to other English cities—Kissane's methodological position may be useful to a broader group of historians looking to understand the way crises affected the economies and social patterns of civic communities.

Kissane proposes two particularly useful methodological arguments: one concerning the agency of communities and the other the definition of community. Although Kissane is the first to apply these concepts to Lincoln they are nevertheless borrowed from recent scholarship such as that by D. M. Palliser ("Urban Decay Revisited" in J. A. F. Thompson (ed.) Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (1998)) and J. H. Arnold (Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (2010)). He argues that historians should prioritize investigating a community's or individual's agency in choosing responses rather than assuming a particular outcome, such as inevitable economic decline following reverses in population size, so that the variety of their responses and their relative fortunes can be better measured and understood. This approach aligns with the recent trends of economic history which aims to outline the functioning of an economy within a particular context, particularly through attention to individual and collective choice and strategy, in an effort to move away from the debilitating effects of more traditional methods that were often aimed at identifying the origins or causes of modern capitalism.

The second methodological argument Kissane makes is that communities should be understood as a "process and activity rather than as something innately ordered or static" that allows historians to see them from the more realistic angle of multi-layered divisions and guards them from too sunny a picture of medieval (or really any other) cities (14). This approach underlies the cultural history portion of Kissane's laudably hybrid study, which combines astute attention to urban space, the motives for founding guild organizations, and their social, religious, and political uses. Kissane is thus able to show the ability of the guilds—as well as public rituals—to promote "cooperation in the community for the good of the community, despite its many differences and divisions … [ensuring] a form of social cohesion or collective identity far beyond the boundaries of the parish" (196).

In addition to these more broadly applicable arguments, Kissane's work is useful as an example of the benefits of these approaches to an extensive analysis of a particular city. Kissane utilizes much of the surviving civic documentation of Lincoln in comparison to royal records and case studies of other English regional cities. His partially statistical presentation of the city's occupational structure (the distribution and general number of professions found at Lincoln), its commercial infrastructure (particularly in terms of tolls, credit, and its position as county seat), and its relationship to the crown (through the fee farm) is a great example of the ability of economic history to provide a foundational outline of historical change and...