The Salt of Common Life

Individuality and Choice in the Medieval Town, Countryside, and Church: Essays Presented to J. Ambrose Raftis

Edited by Edwin Brezette DeWindt

Book cover: The Salt of Common Life

Extent: 562 pages

Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications

Subjects: Medieval Studies, Social Sciences 

Series: Studies in Medieval Culture

Language: English

Paperback (Out of print)

(December 1995)

ISBN: 9781879288478

Price: $54.95

Out of stock

Hardback (Published)

(July 1995)

ISBN: 9781879288461

6.14 x 9.21 inches

Price: $24.95

In stock

The essays within this volume, produced in honor of J. Ambrose Raftis, are united by two themes significant in Raftis’s career: a belief in the fundamental individuality of medieval English men and women, and a belief in their ability to make choices. However much environment, custom, social structure, and even biology might constrain or otherwise affect personal behavior, the men and women who appear in the often laconic entries of medieval court rolls were distinctive, one-of-a-kind persons, and their actions-their deeds and their misdeeds, their triumphs and their failures, their fortunes and their follies-were often the result of choices they had made. That is the medieval world of J. Ambrose Raftis, and it is that world, and that vision, that this book honors.

Contents
Introduction by Edwin Brezette DeWindt
Town
The Grain Trade in Fourteenth-Century Exeter by Maryanne Kowaleski
The Town of Ramsey: The Question of Economic Development, 1290–1523 by Anne Reiber DeWindt
Aspects of Poverty in a Small Medieval Town by Ellen Wedemeyer Moore
The Trials of Partnership in Medieval England: A Case History, 1304 by James Masschaele
Women and Men in the Brewers' Gild of London, ca. 1420 by Judith M. Bennett
"To Catch a Thief" in Jacobean London by Alexandra F. Johnston and Robert Tittler

Countryside
The Livestock of Chaucer's Reeve: Fact or Fiction? by Bruce M. S. Campbell
Social Structure and Social Organization in an English Village at the Close of the Middle Ages: Chewton 1526 by Ian Blanchard
Hemington and Barnwell, Northamptonshire: A Study of Two Manors by David N. Hall
Fishers in Late Medieval Rural Society around Tegernsee, Bavaria: A Preliminary Sketch by Richard C. Hoffmann
"Families have their Fate and Periods": Varieties of Family Experience in the Pre-Industrial Village by Sherri Olson
The Historiographic Unconscious and the Return of Robin Hood by Kathleen A. Biddick

Church
The Social, Economic, and Intellectual Life of Richard Depyng, Vicar of Fillongley (1487–1529) by Denis Brearley
Ramsey Abbey: The Last Days and After by F. Donald Logan

  • Edited by Edwin Brezette DeWindt