Session: #629

Content:

The household offers a scale of analysis on persistence and change appropriate to understanding the variability of lived experiences in the medieval world. It offers a contrast to studies of towns and cities at the scale of the settlement, which are necessarily prone to degrees of generalisation and abstraction. Households are sites of consumption, social production, economic activity and care, which provide a window into the social relations constitutive of urban life. Urban households are heterogeneous, with varying economic bases, levels of wealth and demographic composition. As such, their study allows for the development of a nuanced understanding of how urban communities lived through the crises and turbulence of the Middle Ages, and, by extension, the complexity and diversity of urban lived experiences.

The aim of this session is to develop a comparative, household-scale approach to urban life in the medieval World (broadly conceived as the period c500-1600). Specifically, we wish to explore issues such as:
How do experiences of urbanity vary within and between households?
How did households experience and act on moments of crisis or change?
How do households contribute to the sustenance of the wider fabric of medieval urbanism?
How do the actions of households shape wider neighbourhoods, communities, and settlements, and how are they shaped by their wider social relations?

Contributions which explore a range of evidence including, but not limited to, material culture, buildings, environmental remains and historical sources are welcome, and contributions which explore households in an explicitly comparative sense are particularly encouraged. The session is a collaboration between 2 research projects; ENDURE: Urban Life in a Time of Crisis (which explores urban lifeways in later medieval England) and Consequences of Crisis (which explores the consequences of crisis on towns in later medieval Scandinavia).

Session: #629

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