1st Edition
The Experience of Neighbourhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
The Experience of Neighbourhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe contributes to nascent debates on concepts of neighbourliness and belonging, exploring the operation of the pre-modern neighbourhood in social practice. Formal administrative units, such as the manor and the parish, have been the object of much scholarly attention yet the experience and limits of neighbourhood remain understudied. Building on recent advances in the histories of emotions and material culture, this volume explores a variety of themes on residential proximity, from its social, cultural and religious implications to material and economic perspectives. Contributors also investigate the linguistic categories attached to neighbours and neighbourhood, tracing their meaning and use in a variety of settings to understand the ways that language conditioned the relationships it described. Together they contribute to a more socially and experientially grounded understanding of neighbourly experience in pre-modern Europe.
Introduction: Neighbourhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Revisited
Bronach C. Kane and Simon Sandall
Part I: Neighbours and Neighbourhoods
1. Home and ‘Away’: Neighbours and Strangers in the Urban Communities of Southern Italy at the Start of the Thirteenth Century
Patricia Skinner
2. Neighbourhood and Local Knowledge in Later Medieval England
Bronach C. Kane
3. Senses of Neighbourhood (Vicinanza) in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Claire Judde de Larivière
Part II: Conflict and Coexistence
4. Neighbours Across the Religious Divide: Coping with Difference in Henrician Kent
Sheila Sweetinburgh
5. Neighbourhood Strife and Enmity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Tuscany: A Platform for New Research
Samuel K. Cohn
6. ‘They call their neighbours cowards for not assisting them’: Custom, Neighbourliness and Popular Resistance in Early Modern England
Simon Sandall
7. A Street of Many Parishes: Chester Neighbours, 1670-1730
Emily Cockayne
Part III: Charity and Support
8. Charity and Neighbourly Communities Among the Guilds of Late Medieval Ghent
Laura Crombie
9. ‘All to make mery with’: Testamentary Bequests to Neighbours in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century York
Lisa Liddy
10. Neighbourliness and Poor Relief in Elizabethan Hadleigh, Suffolk
Marjorie K. McIntosh
Part IV: Friendship and Belonging
11. Friends, Family and Neighbours in High-Medieval England: A Hagiographical Perspective
Anne Bailey
12. Neighbours, Friends and Communal Sentiment in Late Medieval Zagreb
Suzana Miljan
13. Friends, Neighbours and Strained Relationships in Seventeenth-Century Norwich and Norfolk
Fiona Williamson
14. ‘Doing Neighbourhood’: Practising Neighbourliness in the Diocese of Durham, 1624-31
Megan Johnston
Biography
Bronach C. Kane is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University. She is co-editor of Women, Agency and the Law, 1300-1700, and the author of works on gender relations, femininity and masculinity among lower-status people in everyday life.
Simon Sandall is Senior Lecturer at the University of Winchester. He is the author of Custom and Popular Memory in the Forest of Dean, c.1550-1832, and has published numerous chapters and articles on society and culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
