Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how increased consumption in the aftermath of the Black Death reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.
Katherine L. French is J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese and The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion After the Black Death, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
"[W]as the plague the end of something, or the beginning? Was it
the devastating calamity that ended two centuries of population
growth and economic expansion in England, or the foundation of a
new ‘golden age’ in the long 15th century (c.1380-1520) for
workers, who leveraged their labour power into higher wages, a
better quality of life and a mountain of consumer goods? Katherine
French provides a new angle on these questions by considering
domestic life and material culture in London...French’s evidence
takes us into the emotional world of late medieval London, but her
materials--all the sentimental wills and cold-eyed
inventories--emphasise the pain of accumulation, the vexed moments
at which objects are invested with an excessive love."
*London Review of Books*
"Katherine French’s latest book is an important contribution to the
history of material culture, viewed from the expert standpoint of a
historian steeped in late medieval English life...Changes in
volumes and types of goods brought changes in both standards and
ways of living, for social change was imbricated with material
goods. The evidence presented here is compelling in so many ways:
questions of gender, of household management, of personal
religion...[O]ne cannot fail to be impressed by this view of the
quotidian life of England’s capital, and by the skill and depth of
knowledge with which French has presented it to us."
*Speculum*
"Katherine French has written a stimulating book that convincingly
uses documentary sources such as inventories and wills not only to
retrace where and how people lived in late medieval London but also
to reconstruct their lives, their emotions, and their aspirations
as they rearranged their lives after the catastrophe of the
Plague...French has given us much to consider about how our current
crisis may relate to what late medieval people experienced and how
these events may have left their traces in the material culture of
their homes and bodies."
*Early Modern Women*
"[A]n immensely evocative and rewarding study of the relationship
between people and things in London between 1300 and 1540...One of
the many strengths of Household Goods and Good Households in Late
Medieval London lies in the manner in which French has brought
together the textual evidence with the archaeological and
museological record. The work as a whole provides a marvelous
introduction to material culture in London before and after the
Black Death, and a new framework for writing a history of the
complex interactions between people and their material
environment."
*The Medieval Review*
"Household Goods offers a detailed analysis of the inventories,
wills and testaments of later medieval London. It is both easy to
read and enjoyable. French provides a real insight, not only into
how people might experience and understand household goods, but
also how these goods affected, and were tied to, people’s social
relationships and identities."
*Urban History*
"Household Goods and Good Households is an impressive achievement.
Its documentation of the material lives of London citizens, from
wealthy merchants to middling craftsmen, across the great divide of
the Black Death is revelatory; her argument about cultural change
in the face of demographic catastrophe is compelling; and her prose
is refreshingly readable."
*EH.net*
"Katherine L. French offers an original and convincing hypothesis
about a distinctive mercantile and artisanal culture that is not
merely emulative of elite consumption practices, but rather
innovative and adaptive. Throughout, she explores the relationship
between gender, 'stuff,' and the lifeways and rituals associated
with household work, food, and childbirth. More broadly, she makes
a powerful contribution to wider historical and sociological
discussions about the relationship between people and their
things."
*Kate Giles, University of York*
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