Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: More than Just a Castle ed. by Theresa Earenfight (review)

Households in medieval and early modern Europe are not new subjects for scholarly study but they are enduringly fascinating. The contributors in this volume have engaged in what Theresa Earenfight calls a 'distinct form of scholarly voyeurism' (p. 1), peering into the lives of many different royal and elite families and households and illuminating them for the reader. Some of these papers were clearly inspired by those given by their authors at the Royal Studies Conference held at Winchester in 2014 (papers by David McDermott, Caroline Dunn, Isabel de Pina Baleiras, Manuela Santos Silva, Germán Gamero Igea, and Hélder Carvalhal). Of the sixteen papers, ten are focused on royal households while the rest deal with elite households.

Despite the ostensible geographical focus being on Europe, there is a bias towards England because, as Earenfight herself points out (p. 2), much of the recent scholarly work has centred on English royal and elite households. This is not necessarily a weakness per se, as the volume includes papers dealing with French, German, Italian, and Iberian (Castile, Portugal, Aragon) regions and monarchies. The lack of any work on Scandinavian royal or elite households is lamented. Nevertheless, the included papers incorporate a range of methodologies and are of a high writing standard, albeit with a few editing errors throughout the volume.

The book's subtitle, 'More than Just a Castle', alludes to the fact that most, if not all, of these papers are focused on the social aspect, that is, the household as 'a group of people who lived and worked under the same roof' (p. 1). With the exception of Audrey Thorstad's examination of how an elite household on the move operated in terms of its economics and consumption, the physical aspects of households for the most part do not feature significantly in any of the papers. In this sense, therefore, this volume occupies a specific niche in the field of histories of household and domesticity. There is an overwhelming emphasis on the people who made up the circles surrounding the royal or noble heads of households. Many of these people belonged to the highest social ranks and were on the most intimate terms with their masters and mistresses, but there were others of lesser ranks who fulfilled vital roles in the households. Readers who are interested in the non-social aspects of royal and elite households will probably need to turn to other published work featuring the structural, organizational, and material aspects of these households, such as The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 1100–c. 1550 (Brepols, 2003) and The Elite Household in England, 1100–1550 (Shaun Tyas, 2018).

This volume has two primary strengths, the first being the diversity of households under examination. Many different royal and elite households are explored, not just ones where the king or a lord was the head. McDermott and Carvalhal's papers take a closer look at the households of royal male offspring, revealing insights into the importance of these entities in terms of power and influence; the papers by Alana Lord and Alexander Brondarbit fulfil similar purposes for the households of elite men. Papers by Dunn, Santos Silva, Megan Welton, Penelope Nash, and Zita Rohr feature households headed by queens or empresses, while those by Linda Mitchell, Eileen Kim, and Sally Fisher examine the households of elite women. The latter two papers, in particular, ask essential questions about the nature of a household and what implications may be drawn when the ostensible head of the household is actually a royal prisoner (as in the case of Eleanor of Brittany in Kim's study) or an elite woman who has been convicted for treason (Fisher's work on Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester). Similarly, Earenfight's paper on the women who served Catherine of Aragon between 1501...