Space and Gender in the Later Medieval English House

Abstract

This article uses “The Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband,” a late fifteenth-century text that associates men with the outdoors and women with the home and the domestic, as a springboard for a comparative analysis of rural and urban housing to explore questions concerning the gender division of space over the course of the English later Middle Ages. The article questions the value of rigid models of gender difference that both normative texts and numbers of modern scholars propose. Drawing upon extant late medieval probate inventories and archaeological evidence, it explores rather different cultural norms between peasant and bourgeois society as reflected in the physical fabric and furnishings of homes. It further considers differences between different levels of society and over time. The article advocates an interdisciplinary methodology and the exploitation of narrative sources, literary or otherwise, to interrogate social practice and the meanings of space.

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