McSheffrey, Shannon

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

KOWALESKI, Maryanne, and GOLDBERG, P. J. P. (eds.) — Medieval Domesticity:Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008. Pp. 317.Medieval Domesticity emanates from Fordham University’s twenty-fifth annualmedieval conference, held in 2005, co-sponsored with the Centre for MedievalStudies at the University of York, UK, and York’s Medieval Household ResearchGroup. Usefully framed by Maryanne Kowaleski’s and Jeremy Goldberg’sintroduction, the essays show the centrality of the domestic to all aspects ofEnglish medieval life — from social relations to material life, politics, religion,and the economy. Underpinning the research here, thanks largely to thenexus created by the York Medieval Household Research Group, is trueinterdisciplinarity.One theme emerging from this essay collection is the cultural work performedby ideas about the household in later medieval English society and politics.Several essays explore the development between 1200 and 1500 of new householdforms and ideologies connected particularly with the more substantial urbandwellers — a “bourgeois” domesticity distinctive from that governing the peasan-try, the aristocracy, the clergy, or even the poorer inhabitants of the towns. FelicityRiddy’s opening essay, “‘Burgeis’ Domesticity in Late-Medieval England,” arguesthat the merchant ethic — marked by pride in civic status, considerable wealth andproperty, and ambition driven by industry, craftsmanship, and skill — dominatedthe urban centres and had become an important counterpoint to aristocraticwealth 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 WilliamLangland’s Piers Plowman,” Isabel Davis sees a moment in the late fourteenthcentury when the new bourgeois ideologies are under challenge. Examining thetextual revisions between the B-text and C-text versions of Piers Plowman onthe treatment of marriage, Davis sees an initially positive treatment of the newbourgeois ethic on marriage give way in the C-text revision to a more traditionalclerical privileging of chastity and virginity. In “Weeping for the Virtuous Wife:Laymen, Affective Piety and Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’,” Nicole Nolan Sidhuargues that the target audience of Chaucer’s version of the immensely popularGriselda story was the same group of substantial bourgeois men whom Riddydescribes, and their evident attraction to the tale lay not in the almost impossiblypatient and passive Griselda as female role model, but in the cruel Walter asanti-model, who exemplified all that the late medieval Christian bourgeoisshould not be.Other essays treat domestic ideologies in other aspects of late medieval Englishlife, in each case complicating our understandings of the medieval household.Mary C. Erler’s “Home Visits: Mary, Elizabeth, Margery Kempe and the Feastof the Visitation” examines the English manifestation of the new fifteenth-century feast of the Visitation, which celebrated Mary’s visit to her cousinElizabeth while both were pregnant. The integration of Christian devotional lifeComptes rendus / Book Reviews 501Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XLII, no 84 (Novembre-November 2009)and the family visit provides a means of understanding the immanence of religiouslife in the domestic. Janet Loengard’s essay, “‘Which may be said to be her own’:Widows and Goods in Late-Medieval England,” considers the relationshipbetween ideology and practice in the developing conceptualization of themarital economy. Loengard looks closely at the divergence between the starkletter of the common law on married women’s ownership of chattels and themore nuanced reality that wives and widows were seen to be entitled to a rangeof personal goods (minimally clothes, girdles, bedclothes, and often muchmore). Nicola McDonald similarly problematizes the role of ideology in theunfolding of household relationships. In “Fragments of (Have Your) Desire:Brome Women at Play,” McDonald examines the “Brome book,” a commonplacebook of the later fifteenth century, which includes amidst its devotional textsand do-it-yourself legal formulae a number of fragments of dicing games,puzzles, and short poems that reveal the gentle household as a venue forplayful heterosexual interaction. McDonald argues that even overtly misogynisticword-puzzles must be seen as ludic rather than straight, as playful invitations todebate the role of women, opening up a space to question the stereotypes asmuch as to reproduce them.A second thread in Medieval Domesticity seeks to draw connections betweenthe material and the social, to demonstrate the imbrication of the physical andespecially the built environment with social relations. Sara Rees Jones in“Building Domesticity in the City: English Urban Housing before the BlackDeath” traces the emergence of timber-frame construction in the early thirteenthcentury, which created flexible, adaptable, yet durable forms of domestic architec-ture. Together with the development of burgage tenure, which allowed for theholding of urban properties outside seigneurial tenure, the new house typeshelped to create new modes of living for the emerging merchant class. JaneGrenville’s “Urban and Rural Houses and Households in the Late MiddleAges” picks up some of the same themes in the period following the BlackDeath, emphasizing the relationship between house and household forms andthe growing authority of the bourgeoisie. Grenville argues that houses withhalls — the more substantial houses of medieval York — were influenced byrural forms and preserved the social purposes of the rural hall (supervision ofdependents, performance of social hierarchy). Jeremy Goldberg’s essay, “TheFashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity in Later Medieval England: A MaterialCulture Perspective,” uses evidence from probate inventories to show that weal-thier urban households manifested a different material culture than their ruralcounterparts, one more focused on household furnishings such as bed linens,cushions, and silver spoons. He argues that this reflects the creation of a new bour-geois culture that allowed both for display for visitors (through items such as silverspoons), and for the creation of an intimate space for the master and mistress inthe midst of an otherwise busy and sometimes crowded household that functionedas workplace as well as domestic space.Other essays examine the built environment of aristocratic and religious house-holds. Mark Gardiner’s essay, “Buttery and Pantry and their Antecedents: Idea502 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XLII, no 84 (Novembre-November 2009)and Architecture in the English Medieval House,” connects the development oftwo service rooms in larger aristocratic houses with changes in social organizationand particularly the role of food and food service in creating and maintainingsocial ties. Marilyn Oliva’s “Nuns at Home: The Domesticity of Sacred Space”finds that to a great extent nuns created domestic interiors that were similar tothe gentry households in which most of them had been born and raised.Again, the material both conveys and creates profound meaning; Oliva suggeststhat these domestic furnishings — similar as they may have been to the gentlehouseholds of their relatives who lived in the world — nonetheless formed partof the devotional world of the late medieval nun, imbued with spiritual anddevotional significance.Medieval Domesticity explores the manifold meanings of home andhousehold in late medieval England, both literal and metaphorical. Historiansof all eras and cultures interested in the “domestic” will find much to thinkabout in this book.Shannon McSheffreyConcordia UniversityKRAMER, Alan — Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the FirstWorld War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 434.Most people would agree that sport, religion, politics, even music can, in variousdegrees, grip and enthral societies. Alan Kramer (an associate professor of historyat Trinity College, Dublin) reminds us here that the same scenario also appliesto war.Two themes summarize this interesting and informative monograph onWorld War I and its immediate aftermath: the mass killing of soldiers and civilians,and the destruction — incidental and deliberate — of cultural artifacts. How dowe account for such a colossal disaster? The answer is an historic shift in thenature of war. Indeed, the industrialization of warfare, the organizational powerof the state (and that includes its military arm) to mobilize all the resourcesof agriculture, industry, science, finance, and culture, the willingness of nationsto be mobilized, and, finally, the firm conviction among all the protagoniststhat “[t]he enemy was not merely the enemy army, but the enemy nationand the culture through which it defined itself” (p. 31) explain the enormouslosses suffered on all fronts in Europe and the Near East — an exercise inself-mutilation without precedent since the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–1648.Not surprisingly, therefore, this dynamic of violence and destruction compelledall belligerents to adopt ever more radical war policies that often violatedinternational law.It all started with the burning of Louvain and its renowned university libraryin August 1914 in the wake of the German invasion of Belgium. Acts of vandalismcontinued relentlessly with the merciless exploitation of occupied territoriesComptes rendus / Book Reviews 503Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XLII, no 84 (Novembre-November 2009)

KOWALESKI, Maryanne, and GOLDBERG, P. J. P. (eds.) — Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England.

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KOWALESKI, Maryanne, and GOLDBERG, P. J. P. (eds.) — Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)