Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England [Hardcover]

Necessary Conjunctions is an original study of how regular medieval people created their public social identities. Focusing especially on the world of English townspeople in the later Middle Ages, the book explores the social self, the public face of the individual. It gives special attention to how prevalent norms of honor, fidelity and hierarchy guided and were manipulated by medieval citizens. With variable success, medieval men and women defined themselves and each other by the clothes they work, the goods they cherished, as well as by their alliances and enemies, their sharp tongues and petty violence. Employing a highly interdisciplinary methodology and an original theory makes it possible to see how personal agency and identity developed within the framework of later medieval power structures.Introduction: The Self in Social History Master Values of Town Life E Pluribus Unum. Peer Pressures The Marriage of Self and Structure Friends, Enemies, Patrons Battles at the Boundary of the Self Self-Possession A World of Individuals Conclusion: The Shape of the Social Self

David Gary Shaw's Necessary Conjunctions offers a subtle, penetrating and persuasive analysis of the concept of the 'social self' as it was realized in the world of late medieval urban society in England. The book powerfully articulates a notion of 'social agency' and how it can be understood in the social worlds of the past, avoiding some of the pitfalls of current discussions of self and the individual in the Middle Ages. Shaw has developed a graceful way of talking about social history that keeps meaning in the forefront, a style always sensitive to the theoretical implications of his findings, without privileging theory as such. At the same time, he is equally successful in conveying historical actualities, providing the reader with textured sense of lives lived within constraints, but also possibilities, that surely was the condition under which individual agency operated in this worldlă°