Barbara A. Hanawalt

If reading The Ties that Bound does not bring any revelations, it is only because, in the quarter of a century since its publication, it has become so foundational to our study of the medieval family and English peasantry. Hanawalt combines a statistical analysis of manorial court records with the accidental deaths reported in the coroner's rolls. She argues that, contrary to what had been claimed by previous historians, the nuclear rather than the extended family was the dominant mode of show more social organisation amongst European peasantry; that even our imperfect records demonstrate the existence of familial affection and a concept of childhood. Moreover, Hanawalt argues that the nuclear family was strengthened at the expense of the community in the century or so following the Black Death, thanks to greater social and physical mobility, more land available for a smaller population, and higher wages. I feel like there are points you could quibble with about her interpretation of individual cases (there were times I stopped and said 'Well surely the cause/consequence of that could be the exact opposite?'), and I can't quite make my mind up as to whether or not she's flirting with biological determinism, but all in all this is an important and interesting read. show less

In The Wealth of Wives, Hanawalt examines women in 14th and 15th century London in terms of their economic activities and opportunities. Hanawalt's argument is that women had an economic importance which has previously gone unrecognised—that they were "conduits of capital" because of the money and property that passed through their hands as participants of the consumer economy, as small traders, but most particularly as heirs, and as recipients of dowry and dower. The laws of dower and show more inheritance which developed in London were different to those of much of continental Europe, and so encouraged the development of "horizontal" rather than "vertical" inheritance of wealth, with property circulating among a particular social grouping rather than passing along patriarchal primogeniture lineages.

Hanawalt's study is based on careful examination of a wide swathe of records, largely legal, and she has a good eye for the illustrative example which is tempered by an awareness that an anecdote can only be extrapolated so far. There are a couple of moments where the editing has gone a little awry—one individual's dates of marriage and death are over a hundred years apart, which seems unlikely—and there are occasionally sentences which make one blink a little, like "The figures on age are few and come from cases in ecclesiastical courts, but they indicate that young women tended to be in their late teens or early twenties." (186) I get what she means here, but it's also unintentionally amusing. show less

Barbara Hanawalt draws primarily on legal records in order to recreate what it was like to grow up in late medieval London—how children and adolescents played, dressed, learned and worked. It's a thorough rebuttal to the work of Philippe Ariès—whose famously influential, though flawed, argument was that there was no such thing as "childhood" in the Middle Ages and that medieval parents didn't love their children. Stylistically, I wasn't the biggest fan of Hanawalt's decision to provide show more narrative "reconstructions" of some of the court cases and the events which led up to them, but they're never implausible, and I could see them (and the book as a whole) going over well in the undergrad classroom. show less

If you read just one book this year about childhood in medieval London, this should be the one.

Hanawalt's exploration is complete. We learn about apprenticeships and guilds, play and puberty, manners of dress and gender differences. Contra Philippe Aries, who famously argued that the medieval world had little concept of childhood, Hanawalt provides ample evidence that childhood was recognized in innumerable ways.

As the father of a 14 year old boy about to enter high school I found it show more interesting to be reminded that the functional equivalent of our high school and college educations was an apprenticeship. The apprentice would live with the master's family, and effectively leave his childhood home at this stage of life. Selection of a master to apprentice one's son (and sometimes one's daughter) was attended by all the attention to detail and payments of large fees that attends modern day high school and college choices. In many ways the apprentice became a foster child to the master, with inheritance rights and other quasi familial connections. The complex contracts around the arrangements provide the documentary memory needed to reconstruct the institution of apprenticeship.

As in many things medieval, we are struck by realizations of familiarity and confrontations with strangeness. My historical memory, in terms of direct family ancestors and outside of my reading of Jewish history, extends backwards only as far as the 18th century in Europe. Medieval London is a construct that extends another 3 to 5 centuries earlier, back to the 1300s. It is as far removed from the early 18th century as we are from the 18th century. In this book you can feel the streets of Chaucer's childhood and Shakespeare's childhood.

I read this before bed for a week or two. It always put me to sleep, but not before informing and teaching me about some forgotten verities and some unique cultural realities. show less