Elaine Clark

Social Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Medieval Countryside

Almost every social problem that troubles the conscience of a community has a history. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, the consequences of crime and epidemic disease—all are familiar topics of contemporary discourse that also mattered in the medieval past. Then, as now, questions about social welfare provoked debate and thoughtful comment in courts, churches, and political councils. The parameters of discussion naturally shifted with the ebb and flow of economic circumstance, but seldom more so than in the fourteenth century, when famine, recurrent plague, and labor unrest disrupted English society. In the villages and little market towns of the countryside, where most of the population lived, the threat of economic insecurity raised ethical and legal dilemmas about begging, vagrancy, and alms for the poor. All posed hard questions for people living in small groups, for they understood, better than solitary folk, how the ideals and practices of social welfare were grounded in communal life. Its conventions and norms reflected the shared values of neighbors and kin, as well as the social boundaries and inequalities of medieval society. How, then, did people who lived by the labor of their hands view the poor and disabled? Were the aged, the unemployed, the infirm, and chronically ill a part of the community, or did disability and want set them apart? These questions pose the problem of how social cohesion and a sense of belonging were maintained by people of diverse sorts and conditions in the medieval countryside. To ignore or hurriedly dismiss their interest in the subject of community life would be a mistake.

The Custody of Children in English Manor Courts

Very little is known about the young and the orphaned in the villages of medieval England. The span of years constituting childhood as well as the social experiences peculiar to youth must be deduced from either literary sources, including the comments of chroniclers and priests, or legal records generated by coroners, jurors and feudal lords. The variety and scope of this evidence notwithstanding, certain questions about the care of children in the rural world remain unresolved. Did peasants view childhood as a period of protected dependency, and at what age did childhood cease? How did the change in status from child to adult take place? There was, it seems, no public proclamation, no elaborate ceremony or ritual. Instead it appears that children quietly entered the adult world as soon as they no longer were dependent on their mothers and nurses. Indeed the dependency of medieval children now has the semblance of brevity, neither prolonged by families nor subject to broader constraint. But does this appearance fully account for the passage of childhood in peasant society?

Book Review: Sexuality and culture in medieval and renaissance Europe. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History

In this thoughtfully edited volume, Philip Soergel brings together an international group of nine scholars, all historians of pre-modern society and culture. Their essays range from micro-studies of rural and urban women to broad statements about the nature and transmission of the Hippocratic corpus. All provide a fresh perspective on an often misunderstood topic: the history of human sexuality. Here, the topic is taken seriously and addressed with confidence and skill. Sexuality and culture opens with an engaging survey of medieval womens medicine. Monica Green reviews and discusses recent scholarship on technologies of the body, sexual difference, and the history of childbirth. There are also references to edited texts and on-line databases, the latter allowing for what Green aptly calls the democratization of knowledge. Her concern to elucidate theories of human sexuality is shared by Helen King in an essay that explains how ancient Greek texts re-entered the medical mainstream in the sixteenth century. This Hippocratic revival enhanced the perception that the female body required discrete and distinctive therapies. No longer was it commonplace to infer that women, with genitalia supposedly shrunk inward, were hardly different from men. The scientific thinking of the sixteenth century was more expansive and measured than this. Of course, people in earlier centuries were no less interested in acquiring knowledge and testing traditional norms. This is evident in three essays on the medieval world. In the first, ‘A medieval territory for touch’, Fernando Salmon reviews Latin commentaries on the five senses. He argues that touch represented a complex of sensations, surrounding the body like a net, and gradually becoming the locus of self and experience. What ultimately mattered were not simply the sexual overtones associated with touch, but the role it had in forming personal identity. Medieval constructions of personality reflected an interest in natural philosophy and admittedly had a part in Latin physiognomy. This was the art of discerning character and sexual nature by studying genitalia. Rather than dismiss physiognomy as little better than pseudo-science, Joseph Ziegler uses the scholastic commentaries it generated to document alternative ways of perceiving the body. More detailed as to practice is Carol Lansings essay reconstructing a civic inquiry into female sodomy in 1295. Her story of Guercia of Bologna is so artfully told that it deepens our understanding of an aspect of sexuality seldom glimpsed in medieval texts. Equally informative are four essays that address the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using Christian tradition as her starting point, Merry Weisner-Hanks places Martin Luther centre stage, deftly highlighting his ideas about the male libido and how they figured in Reformation theology and social thought. Joel Harrington discusses German society as well. Exploring the plight of an unwed mother in Nuremberg, he helps us to see that a story such as hers is at the very heart of social history. Mindful of a mothers life, Charlene Villasenor Black argues on behalf of utilizing images of the Madonna and Child to measure changes in breastfeeding and maternity in early modern Spain. Hers is an eloquent argument, illustrated by reproductions of Spanish painting and altar art. Retha Warnickes meditation on marriage and female rulers in Britain concludes this volume, leaving no doubt that sexual nature influenced destiny in the arena of politics and power. The essays collected here obviously differ in method and approach. Yet all are distinguished by rigorous scholarship and historical insight. To read them together is to see that the story of human sexuality was as complex and compelling in medieval and renaissance Europe as it is today.