Household knowledges in late- medieval England and France

This book examines how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of information. Considering the reciprocal relationship between the domestic experience and its cultural expression, contributors provide a fresh illustration of the imaginative scope of the late-medieval home and its centrality to cultural production. -- . "Household Knowledges investigates how the late-medieval household acts as a sorter, user, and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on established work on the noble and royal 'great household', as well as on materialist historiography on rural and bourgeois domestic life, it considers bourgeois, gentry, and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The collection argues that the relationship between the domestic experience and the forms assumed by that experience's cultural expression is both dynamic and reciprocal. It addresses a variety of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, agricultural and estates management literature, devotional and medical writing, household music and drama, and manuscript anthologies. The contributors develop a range of methodologies, drawing on insights generated by recent manuscript scholarship as well as on innovations in affect theory and object relations theory; their chapters reconsider the constitution of the late-medieval urban and gentry home by practices of writing and reading, translation and language use, and manuscript compilation, as well as by the development of complex object-human relations, and the adaptation of traditional gender and class roles. Together, the studies in Household Knowledges provide a fresh illustration of the imaginative scope of the late-medieval household, of its extensive internal and external connections, and of its fundamental centrality - both as an idea and a reality - to late-medieval cultural production." -- Back cover Front matter -1 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of figures 10 List of contributors 11 List of abbreviations 14 Introduction: the home life of information 16 Knowledge production in the late-medieval married household: the case of Le Menagier de Paris 31 Knowing incompetence: elite women in Caxton’s Book of the Knight of the Tower 60 Renovating the household through affective invention in manuscripts Ashmole 61 and Advocates 19.3.1 89 The Christmas drama of the household of St John’s College, Oxford 115 Household song in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale 144 Field knowledge in gentry households: ‘pears on a willow’? 169 Domestic ideals: healing, reading, and perfection in the late-medieval household 193 Macrocosm and microcosm in household manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 216 The multilingual English household in a European perspective: London, British Library MS Harley 2253 and the traffic of texts 234 Bibliography 259 Index 281 This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production