The Later Medieval English Urban Household

Home is one of the most emotive words in any language but our experience of being at home is historically and culturally specific. This article reviews a range of recent scholarship on the later medieval English urban household in the disciplines of History, Literary criticism and Archaeology. It has been composed collaboratively by the members of the York Medieval Household Research Group. After an introduction tracing the wider context in which all histories of domesticity are located, we focus in on our particular period through a close study of contemporary later medieval vocabularies of homeliness. This is followed by a sequence of short thematic sections addressing the historiography of different aspects the demographic structure, ideological construction and daily and emotional life of the household as reflected in the current interests of members of the group.