The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England

Description

This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism. It contributes to the construction of a materialist historicism while, at the same time, proposing that discussions of work need not be limited to the clash between labour and capital. To this end, the essays offer more than a strictly historical view of the complex terms, social and literary, within which labour was treated in the medieval period. Several of the essays strive to reformulate the very critical language we use to think about the categories of labour and work through a continually doubled engagement with modern theories of labour and medieval theories and practices of labour. Front Matter....Pages i-vi Introduction Conceptualizing Labor in the Middle Ages....Pages 1-15 Front Matter....Pages 17-17 The Idioms of Women’s Work and Thomas Hoccleve’s Travails....Pages 19-40 “As If She Were Single”: Working Wives and the Late Medieval English Femme Sole....Pages 41-64 Front Matter....Pages 65-65 “The Workman is Worth His Mede”: Poverty, Labor, and Charity in the Sermon of William Taylor....Pages 67-90 The Naked and the Dead: The Carpenters’ Company and Lay Spirituality in Late Medieval England....Pages 91-110 Front Matter....Pages 111-111 Reconstructing English Labor Laws: A Medieval Perspective....Pages 113-132 Branding and the Technologies of Labor Regulation....Pages 133-153 Front Matter....Pages 155-155 The Displacement of Labor in Winner and Waster....Pages 157-177 Scribal Hermeneutics and the Genres of Social Organization in Piers Plowman....Pages 179-206 Front Matter....Pages 207-207 Poetic Work and Scribal Labor in Hoccleve and Langland....Pages 209-228 The Erasure of Labor: Hoccleve, Caxton, and the Information Age....Pages 229-260 Back Matter....Pages 261-267