This conference on urban domestic space had a very interesting and varied programme and we were delighted to welcome the young and dynamic Dr. Chris King from University of Leicester as our keynote speaker.
Chris foregrounded some of the broader issues of interdisciplinarity such as how to integrate work on surviving structures and objects within current research agendas in early modern studies. The topic raised some important issues for discussion.
However, Chris also discussed some interesting case studies from Norwich. His PhD ‘House and society in an English provincial city: the archaeology of urban households in Norwich, 1370-1700’, was based on a survey of surviving domestic buildings and archaeological excavations, analyzing changing patterns of these domestic spaces and social interaction in public and private spaces. So his keynote provided an especially apt comparative analysis for both our Canterbury field trip and our document workshop, and presented fascinating resonances with late medieval and early modern Canterbury.
Chris’s current British Academy research project, ‘Voices of Dissent’, is an archaeological and topographic analysis, exploring the role of religious nonconformity in the increasing fragmentation and complexity of religious and political space in the early modern city.
We were very grateful that Chris attended the whole conference.

This paper seeks to consider whether the inversions and spells involving the Pater Noster during the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval periods derived from errors in Church teaching, misunderstandings or deliberate deviance. I will explore the Black and White Pater Noster which were both believed to be connected to witchcraft and also the inclusion of the prayer within earlier Anglo-Saxon charms and spells. Many of these charms evoke the prayer for protection or cure from illness similarly to the authorised evocation of the Saints for guidance and assistance. The difference between authorised actions and those which were deemed to be subversive and non-Christian and the role that the Church played in the initial association of prayers with magic provide the framework for this discussion.

The fourteenth century saw the city of Prague in the midst of sweeping change.  The Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV had established the city as the new capitol of the Empire and was actively encouraging its growth. This rapidly growing urban milieu was home to the popular and outspoken radical reform preacher Jan Milíč z Kroměříže.  Milíč’s preaching focused upon the need for spiritual reform within the Church and warned of the imminent coming of the Antichrist.  Although extremely popular with the townspeople of Prague and favoured by Imperial patronage, Milíč was seen by other clergy members as an incendiary adversary who was detrimental to the church.
This paper will argue that Milíč used Prague and its public space as a stage from which to deliver his radical message of reform and lend it authority.  It is my assertion that his work was allowed to continue unhindered because it was undertaken in the context of a city actively attempting to position itself as a religious leader in Europe. This paper suggests that Milíč’s tendency to preach in new churches and religious communities helped to cast his message as modern and forward thinking, rather than provocative and heretical.
The topography of fourteenth Century Prague, Charles IV’s directives on the expansion of the city, and the areas in which Milíč worked, are considered in this paper.  In particular, the individual churches and religious communities in which Milíč preached, their locations and surrounding neighborhoods as well as their dates of construction are considered.  Evidence for the paper is drawn from Imperial Bulls (the Bulla Aurae), chronicles (the Chronicon Benesii de Weitmili), access to the sites under consideration, and two of Milíč’s biographies (the Narricio Myliczyo and the Vita venerabilis presbyteri Miliccii). 
This paper is in keeping with the conference’s theme as it is an examination of the use of display both by government bodies and individuals in public space and its ability to confirm authority even on transgressive ideas. 

In the second half of the 16th century the Transylvanian city of Cluj (Kolozsvár, Klausenburg) rapidly evolved from a favorite urban child of the Hungarian royal crown to an eastern symbol of the Reformation. For a city largely deprived of a proper rural estate until the 1590s and over-shadowed on the commercial level by the cities of Sibiu (Nagyszeben, Hermannstadt) and Bra-şov (Brassó, Kronstadt) in southern and south-eastern Transylvania, the downfall of the me-dieval Hungarian kingdom and the spread of the Reformation came as a blessing. As Cluj was the only city in Transylvanian where the power was divided equally since the 1450s between the Hungarians and the Saxons (the other cities were controlled by the Transylvanian Saxons), the city in north-western Transylvania gradually turned into a new Buda for the Hungarian com-munities (the old royal capital was, since 1540, in Ottoman hands) and not only established it-self as a (quite) safe haven for reformers, but also became ‘the Rome’ of the Unitarian Church.
Irrespective of confessional denominations and social standards, the socio-cultural impact of these evolutions was considerable. Yet it did not make Cluj (a place where the most substantial, as well as lasting, local marks of the architectural improvements brought by the Renaissance were the huge wine cellars) a ‘more moral’ city. In comparison to the 1400s and especially to the 1490s, corruption apparently decreased (at least on the documentary level of the major officials of the city). In return, violence and abuses increased. Scandals (caused namely by prolonged drun-kenness or by repeated marital misconducts), infant murders, witchcraft rumors and trials or ‘indecent behaviors’ seem to have been some of the defining features of a city that should have combined the traits of Geneva and of Rome for the Reformation. A certain rebellious nature of the city (for which Cluj had paid dearly after the Transylvanian and Hungarian uprisings of 1437-1438, in particular, and 1514) resurfaced from its legal and social confinement. Ethnic (i.e. social in essence) and confessional disputes developed these tensions in particular in the late 1560s and 1570s. Hungarians and Saxons fought over local supremacy as they had done in the 1440s and 1450s. The Walachian guards of the city were gradually deprived of their ro-yal privileges and started acting as unemployed mercenaries. After the Catholic family Báthory ascended to Transylvanian power, a Jesuit college was founded in Cluj, much to the dislike of the local elites (they eventually had the Jesuits expelled). Various plotters against the figures in power gathered in Cluj in order to plan their (usually failed) coups. A, not only apparent, more lasting social and confessional peace was achieved on the local level starting with the 1610s on the eve of the Thirty Year War which established the Transylvanian principality as a major Central European power. By that time, the city, generally unharmed by major military operations in the Middle Ages, had also experienced the effects of Habsburg and Ottoman campaigns.

“Throughout the whole history of Christ Church Priory, its monks were factious, turbulent, luxurious, litigious, and tyrannical, perpetually in opposition to their archbishop and their king, and everlasting quarrelling with the Abbot of St. Augustine’s and the Prior of Dover.”[C. R. Haines, 1930].
Haines was adamant that the monks of Canterbury were nothing but troublemakers who paid little heed to the thoughts, words and deeds of their long dead mentors, Archbishop Lanfranc and St Benedict. To support the case study this paper will examine extant manuscripts in Canterbury Cathedral, Lambeth Palace and the National Archives which contain details of the on-going jurisdictional dispute which was prosecuted before the king, the papacy and the Court of Arches; a jurisdictional dispute that lasted approximately 200 years. Because of the long time span involved this paper will establish the early background to the dispute highlighting the claims of each party before focussing on the final stages and conclusion of the legal case in the early 14th century. Detailed examination of extant manuscripts should highlight how Christ Church monks managed the litigation process and the use they made of a network of highly placed contacts to achieve their goal of control over Dover Priory.
The paper will also examine the behavioural patterns of the Canterbury monks, the king and various papal legates when interacting with three different and yet interrelated jurisdictional systems; two ecclesiastical, the archbishop and the papacy, and one royal; since alleged illegal behaviour was not confined to Christ Church or the archbishop but also included Edward I who, in 1286, confiscated the advowson of Dover Priory thereby not only usurping archiepiscopal authority but also papal authority, by overriding Innocent III’s privilege of Canterbury’s authority over Dover.
From an examination of the legal processes and individual jurisdictional behaviour the paper will conclude by answering the key question, “was there any improper behaviour and if so by whom."

Following in the footsteps of cultural historians such as Peter Burke and Elizabeth Hallam, the proposed paper will seek to explain the nature of threat and insult in late medieval Nottingham. Drawing primarily upon the Borough Court Rolls of the city, the paper will consider the case of Thomas Benton and Hugh Wymeslowe, two local figures of the middling sort, who were noted in the records after their altercation in the Hall of Common Pleas in 1396. By focusing on a particular case study the paper will seek to outline the importance of the individual in micro-historical studies whilst contextualising both the evidence and the approach within the larger framework of local social relations. This, in turn, will consider economic factors, such as bonds of credit and the award of damages in cases of slander, the nature and development of a late medieval urban topography, as well as the use of public and quasi-public space as both a manifestation of local power and as a representation of an increasingly centralised municipal government.

This paper will examine the perceptions of sexual norm and deviance in medieval images in light of medieval medical, theological and legal treatises about gender and sexuality. Although medieval culture seems to be full of taboos, prohibitions and stringent laws that pushed the issues of sex to the margins, even a cursory glance at the art and the texts in the late Middle Ages reveals how concerned medieval society was with the topic of sex and with social control of its members’ sexual behavior.
This paper defines two main iconographic groups of depicting copulation in medieval manuscripts. The first one includes scenes of heterosexual coitus from a wide range of textual contexts, such as illustrated Bibles, medical and courtly romance manuscripts. These scenes showed a restrained iconographical convention that depicted couples in matrimonial beds, avoiding nakedness and stressing the passive role of the woman. These images were placed in the center of the manuscript’s folio.
Nevertheless, medieval artists were indeed capable of depicting the so-called “sinful” and lustful practices, as they were defined by the Church and the Medicine. Such images are mainly found on the manuscripts’ margins, and they display explicit sexual scenes that show nudity and forbidden sexual practices. Generally, the margins of medieval manuscripts were interpreted by scholars as a place where the marginal phenomena of medieval life were expressed, and as a refuge for suppressed erotic fantasies. The church and medicine saw in procreation the ultimate goal of sex and they believed that it could be subverted by forbidden sexual practices such as women’s dominance, improper positions and same-sex desire.
The difference between these two groups of images is striking. Nakedness and forbidden sexual practices were pushed outside of the matrimonial bed and away from the center of the page toward the margins of the manuscripts. This paper demonstrates that the marginal position of these images in the manuscripts shows the marginal status of the practices they represent, and at the same time emphasizes the normative status of sex for the sake of procreation.

Chaucer’s unfinished Cook’s Tale details the life of a disruptive apprentice working in and around London’s Cheapside. The tale recounts this apprentice’s movement away from the ordered and regulated space of his master’s shop and towards the disordered and unregulated public space of Cheapside, a site of illicit gatherings, gambling, and prostitution. My paper will explore how Chaucer’s presentation of Cheapside chimes with the presentation of the street in contemporary civic documents, including petitions, proclamations and entries in the mayor’s letter-books. These texts emphasise Cheapside’s centrality to social, commercial and ceremonial life within the city, but they also expose the darker side of the street, documenting the violence, political infighting, and illegal trade which went on under successive mayors. However, while the Cook’s Tale and these civic documents share this similar presentation of Cheapside as a problematic space, my paper will show that they differ significantly in the future that they envisage for the street. For the civic documents are concerned with resolving the tensions and transforming Cheapside into an idealised space, both through the regulating of behaviour and through the punishing of infractions. In Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale, by contrast, the apprentice’s transgressions go unpunished with the consequence that Cheapside is left a disordered and unregulated space at the poem’s end. My paper will suggest that Chaucer was left unable to finish the Cook’s Tale as he, unlike the writers of the various civic documents, could not conceive of a suitable remedy that would ease the tensions which were rife on Cheapside.

The representation of excessively rich, greedy and corrupt judges, lawyers and other legal professionals had already been established by the time of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, and continued in early modern England, drama being no exception. In the background of this satirical literature, however, there was widespread awareness and use of legal courts and professionals by all strata of the English society. In the middle decades of the 16th century, England witnessed a spectacular increase in litigation in the common law courts. The exposure to the law and people's high expectation of it sometimes led to hostilities towards secular and religious professionals of the law and towards the legal systems in general. This presentation will look at representations of judges and lawyer figures in Tudor interludes and some other related literature. From the beginning of the 16th century towards the opening of the commercial theatres in the 1570s, Tudor interludes rapidly transformed from Catholic sacramental drama to plays concerned with diverse religious and secular topics, legal topic being among the more conspicuous. I aim to survey the historical backgrounds of the accusations of legal corruption, and examine several interludes such as Cambises, All for Money, and Promos and Cassandra, amongst others, which depict corrupt judges and lawyers. The judges in the interludes tend to be depicted as tyrannical rulers as well as judges with legal expertise, and thus seem to be loosely based on the models of tyrants in older Biblical and allegorical drama. There are very few lawyer figures in interludes, but we have a good example called Pallax in Promos and Cassandra.

Beginning in the early fourteenth century, medieval English pastoral authors betray a patent fascination and consternation with the problem of turpiloquium, or illicit and explicit sexual speech. The magnitude and validity of this anxiety, as well as well as the perceived prevalence of the problem, are graphically illustrated in fifteenth-century morality plays and sixteenth-century ecclesiastical court records, which abound with examples of this dangerous and startlingly explicit strain of transgressive talk. My paper explores how turpiloquium was imagined and enacted in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, examining its content, contexts, and consequences. The early morality play Castle of Perseverance (c. 1405-25) stages a series of turpiloquious tirades by Lechery, the only female Vice, culminating in a veritably pornographic conversation between Lechery and Mankind that functions as verbal intercourse. Sixteenth-century church court depositions, on the other hand, portray sexually obscene vernacular speech in action, as in the example from Chester which serves as this paper’s title and is repeated in several depositions in the same defamation case. Overall, this paper seeks to uncover how turpiloquium was imagined in late medieval English literature and culture, focusing on its specific content and context, and attempting to pinpoint what specifically constituted the boundary between licit and illicit sexual speech in late Middle English.

The presence of fantastic landscapes in the popular culture of medieval Europe has long been recognised. Such imaginary topographies as Cockaigne, Luilekkerland, Narragonia and their variants recur throughout the popular literature of the period, where they seem to play an important role, acting as collective wish-fulfilment fantasies. However, much of the criticism dealing with these conceptions assumes that they were relatively stable ideas, moving from text to text, and from culture to culture, with little revision or modification; typically any change in their form is attributed to the innovations of particular artists or writers, rather than any larger factors. This paper will examine occurrences of the motifs in the drama and art issuing out of the cities of the Netherlands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will chart how the landscapes are modified as they are inserted into this urban, largely middle-class milieu, and made to support new ideas and desires. In so doing, it will hope to uncover how the people of these communities thought about space, and in particular its links to need and pleasure.