Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Based on extensive archival research, this book traces the social, political, and economic development of the city Manresa in Catalonia during the later middle ages. It combines a narrative of long-term developments with one of the most precise snapshots of the people living in a late medieval city which has ever been produced. Reviving a classic, though recently neglected genre - the late medieval "urban decline" narrative centered on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - the book applies this analysis, using the latest urban-historical scholarship from across Europe on topics such as state formation, women's work, and state formation, to an Iberian city.
Synopsis
Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families--one knightly and one mercantile--with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and occupation. The town in question is the market town and administrative centre of Manresa in Catalonia, whose exceptional archives make such a study possible. For the diachronic studies, Fynn-Paul relied upon the fact that Manresan archives preserve scores of individual family notarial registers, and the cross-sectional study was made possible by the Liber Manifesti of 1408, a cadastral survey which details the property holdings of individual householders to an unusually thorough degree.
In these pages, the economic and social strategies of many individuals, including both knights and burghers, come to light over the course of several generations. The Black Death and its aftermath play a prominent role in changing the outlook of many social actors. Other chapters detail the socioeconomic topography of the town, and examine occupational hierarchies, for such groups as rentiers, merchants, leatherworkers, cloth workers, women householders, and the poor.