Suchergebnisse

A study of the relationship between women's economic opportunity and marriage in the 14th and 15th centuries, this explores the role of women in the economy and the part that marriage played in their lives. The book is based on a study of York and Yorkshire

In a recent article Frederik Pedersen used the records of matrimonial

litigation from the York consistory, the principal Church court of the

province, during the fourteenth century to make a number of observations

concerning the relationship of these records to the society from which
they
were generated. He argued that 'the medieval court documents do not

present a random sample illustrating trends in the surrounding society'

and that litigants tended to be disproportionately drawn on the one hand

from the upper echelons of society and on the other hand from locations

close to York itself. He has further suggested that the age structures
of
male and female deponents found within the surviving cause papers do
not fit the same model life tables and that this raises 'further
doubts about
the representativeness of court documents as evidence of changing
patterns of lay behaviour'. In this article, I shall show that his
analysis is
based upon a flawed methodology, is marred by error, and is ultimately

mistaken. Pedersen's essential point in 'Demography in the archives',
as
outlined in the Abstract to the article, is that the people who appear
in the
court records are unrepresentative of society as a whole, and hence 'that

the court records tell us more about the people who used the courts than

about trends in the society in which litigation arose'. My argument
is that
it is the very unrepresentativeness of the people and their cases that

provides us with a window into the society from which the cases arise.
I
shall suggest ways in which the York cause paper evidence can indeed be

used to illuminate broader social trends, but also suggest caveats as to
the
reading of individual causes.

Evidence for childhood and youth from the sixth century to the sixteenth, but with particular emphasis on later medieval England. Moving on from the legacy of Ariès, these essays address evidence for childhood and youth from the sixth century to the sixteenth, but with particular emphasis on later medieval England. The contents include the idea of childhoodin the writing of Gregory of Tours, skaldic verse narratives and their implications for the understanding of kingship, Jewish communities of Northern Europe for whom children represented the continuity of a persecuted faith, children in the records of the northern Italian Humiliati, the meaning of romance narratives centred around the departure of the hero or heroine from the natal hearth, the age at which later medieval English youngsters left home, how far they travelled and where they went, literary sources revealing the politicisation of the idea of the child, and the response of young, affluent females to homiletic literature and the iconography of the virgin martyrs in the later middle ages. Contributors: FRANCES E. ANDREWS, HELEN COOPER, P.J.P.GOLDBERG, SIMCHA GOLDIN, EDWARD F. JAMES, JUDITH JESCH, KIM M. PHILLIPS, MIKE TYLER, ROSALYNN VOADEN.

Book Reviews in this Article:Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women.Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague.Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England.Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570‐1640.Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Sul movimento politico delle donne. Scritti inediti.Alison Prentice, Paula Bourne, Gail Cuthbert Brandt, Beth Light, Wendy Mitchinson and Naomi Black, Canadian Women: A History.Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect, Women in English Local Government, 1865‐1914.Ann Morley with Liz Stanley, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison. A Biographical Detective Story, with Gertrude Colmore's The Life of Emily Davison'.Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860‐1914.