Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France

This collection of essays 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. Arguing that the relationship between the domestic experience and the forms assumed by that experience's cultural expression is dynamic and reciprocal, 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. -- .