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IMC 2011: Sessions

Session 1226: 'Cheryssh Others and Love hem So': Neighbourliness in Late Medieval England

Wednesday 13 July 2011, 14.15-15.45

Organiser:Bronach Kane, Queen Mary, University of London
Moderator/Chair:Janka Dorothy Rodziewicz, School of History, University of East Anglia
Paper 1226-aFriendship, Antagonism, or Mutual Cooperation?: Neighbourliness in the Small Houses of Urban England
(Language: English)
Jayne A. E. Rimmer, York Archaeological Trust
Index terms: Archaeology - General, Social History
Paper 1226-bFriendship and Neighbourliness in the Medieval English Church Courts
(Language: English)
Bronach Kane, Queen Mary, University of London
Index terms: Gender Studies, Social History
Paper 1226-cTextual Neighbours: Instructing on Good (and Bad) Neighbourly Behaviour in a Late 15th-Century Manuscript
(Language: English)
Kate McLean, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Social History
Abstract

This session adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the meaning and performance of neighbourliness. The gulf between ideals and practice concern each of the three papers, which use a range of sources to explore the spatial performance of friendship and neighbourliness. Kate McClean focuses on the Liber Catonis, a late 15th-century conduct text, analysing how personal conduct in the household was reconciled with the existence of the neighbour. Jayne Rimmer draws on rental and repair accounts from small houses in York and Norwich, underscoring the ways in which marerial demands of neighbourliness influenced how late medieval people learned to live beside one another. Bronach Kane explores church court testimony in order to consider the performance of neighbourliness, and rhetorial manipulation and subversion of these ideals amongst near neighbours. The session is intended to encourage conversations across disciplines, suggesting how contrasting discourses of neighbourlines emerge from disparate sources.