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3 books match the query 'Cities and towns, Medieval'
A Day in a Medieval City
Chiara Frugoni
University of Chicago Press, 2005
An opportunity to experience the daily hustle and bustle of life in the late Middle Ages, A Day in a Medieval City provides a captivating dawn-to-dark account of medieval life. A visual trek through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—with seasoned historian and expert on medieval iconography Chiara Frugoni as guide—this book offers a vast array of images and vignettes that depicts the everyday hardships and commonplace pleasures for people living in the Middle Ages.
A Day in a Medieval City breathes life into the activities of the city streets, homes, fields, schools, and places of worship. With entertaining anecdotes and gritty details, it engages the modern reader with its discoveries of the religious, economic, and institutional practices of the day. From urban planning and education to child care, hygiene, and the more leisurely pursuits of games, food, books, and superstitions, Frugoni unearths the daily routines of the private and public lives of citizens. A Day in a Medieval City is a charming portal to the Middle Ages that you'll surely want with you on your travels to Europe—or in your armchair.
A Day in a Medieval City breathes life into the activities of the city streets, homes, fields, schools, and places of worship. With entertaining anecdotes and gritty details, it engages the modern reader with its discoveries of the religious, economic, and institutional practices of the day. From urban planning and education to child care, hygiene, and the more leisurely pursuits of games, food, books, and superstitions, Frugoni unearths the daily routines of the private and public lives of citizens. A Day in a Medieval City is a charming portal to the Middle Ages that you'll surely want with you on your travels to Europe—or in your armchair.
“With its color illustrations of rare paintings and artifacts, this thoughtful and informative, elegantly fashioned excursion into the life of a medieval city is a veritable feast of information and visual delights. Frugoni is a marvelously experienced historical travel guide.”—Choice
“Stunningly beautiful . . . and a good read as well. . . . It’s amazing how much wealth of detail and image Ms. Frugoni has packed into this delightful, relatively small book.”—Steve Goode, Washington Times
“Charming and insightful. . . .Written with exceptional grace and infused with a warm sense of humanity.”—Library Journal
“Stunningly beautiful . . . and a good read as well. . . . It’s amazing how much wealth of detail and image Ms. Frugoni has packed into this delightful, relatively small book.”—Steve Goode, Washington Times
“Charming and insightful. . . .Written with exceptional grace and infused with a warm sense of humanity.”—Library Journal
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City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe
Barbara Hanawalt
University of Minnesota Press, 1994
Medieval Europe is known for its sense of ceremony and drama. Knightings, tournaments, coronations, religious processions, and even private celebrations such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals were occasions for ritual, feasting, and public display. This volume is the first to take a comprehensive look at the many types of city spectacles that entertained the masses and confirmed various messages of power in late medieval Europe. Bringing together leading scholars in history, art history, and literature, this interdisciplinary collection sets new standards for the study of medieval popular culture.
Drawing examples from Spain, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, most of them in the fifteenth century, the authors explore the uses of ceremony as statements of political power, as pleas for divine intercession, and as expressions of popular culture. Their essays show us spectacles meant to confirm events such as victories, the signing of a city charter, or the coronation of a king. In other circumstances, the spectacle acts as a battleground where a struggle for the control of the metaphors of power is played out between factions within cities or between cities and kings. Still other ceremonies called upon divine spiritual powers in the hope that their intervention might save the urban inhabitants. We see here a public cognizant of the power of symbols to express its goals and achievements, a society reaching the height of sophistication in its manipulation of popular and elite culture for grand shows.[more]
Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities
Martha C. Howell
University of Chicago Press, 1986
In this bold reinterpretation of Women's changing labor status during the late medieval and early modern period, Martha C. Howell argues that women's work was the product of the intersection of two systems, one cultural and one economic. Howell shows forcefully that patriarchal family structure, not capitalist development per se, was a decisive factor in determining women's work. Women could enjoy high labor status if they worked within a family production unit or if their labor did not interfere with their domestic responsibilities or threaten male control of a craft or trade.
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