IMC 2020: Sessions
Session 346: Burgesses and Gentlemen: Material Culture at the Boundaries of Status
Monday 6 July 2020, 16.30-18.00
| Sponsor: | Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York |
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| Organiser: | Jeremy Goldberg, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York |
| Moderator/Chair: | Rachel Delman, University College, University of Oxford |
| Paper 346-a | Probi homines: Identities, Bodies, and the Material World of Medieval English Merchants (Language: English) Index terms: Archaeology - General, Architecture - Secular, Daily Life |
| Paper 346-b | Arms at the Border: Armour and Weaponry in Late Medieval Burgess and Gentry Houses (Language: English) Index terms: Archives and Sources, Daily Life, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Social History |
| Paper 346-c | The Gentleman and His House (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Secular, Archives and Sources, Daily Life, Social History |
| Abstract | This session uses material culture and documentary evidence for material culture to think about how buildings and their furnishings reflected and were used to project social rank in the English later Middle Ages. In particular it seeks to explore the imagined boundary between the ‘bourgeois’ society of merchants and that of the lower ranks of the aristocracy usually referred to as the gentry. Do merchants seek to emulate the aristocracy or do they project a distinctive cultural identity? Can the same be asked of gentlemen who gain their rank through service rather than bearing arms? The session seeks to stimulate debate as much as to answer questions. |