The Ties That Bound

The Ties that Bound

Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

The Ties that Bound

The Ties that Bind

This collection of essays reflects both the broad range of topics Barbara Hanawalt has broached as a medieval historian and also those her graduate students felt empowered to explore when working with her. Offering a wide methodological and disciplinary range, from political history to social history, and a broad range of sources, from public records to chronicles and literature, the contributors cover the identification of alien clothworkers to the communal aspects of the mayor of Norwich's body; from the self-creation of noble widows to the community creation of chaste women collectives. The introduction further provides an overview of the influence of Professor Hanawalt's work on modern-day medieval studies.