Book chapters by Merridee Bailey
Approaching Women and Work in Pre-modern Europe
Working for Women: Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation in Pre-Modern Europe (Routledge, 2018), ed. Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell, Julie Hotchin: 1-29., 2018
It is with a view to understanding and assessing the complexity of
women’s working lives that Wom... more It is with a view to understanding and assessing the complexity of
women’s working lives that Women and Work in Premodern Europe,
c. 1100 – 1800 explores the interrelated perspectives of women’s experiences of work; their working relationships with other women, men, and God; and the cultural representation of women’s participation across various spheres of endeavour. This requires the integration of cultural, intellectual, and economic activities into the repertoire of what work means, and did mean, to women and men in the past. The temporal and geographic scope through which women and work are examined spans roughly 1100– 1800 and covers a large expanse of western Europe, including Germany, France and the Netherlands, and England. Throughout the volume, premodern is used as an inclusive term that refers to the period ranging from the medieval through to the latter phase of the early modern era.This volume has two aims: to demonstrate how a more encompassing concept of work extends to a variety of women’s (and of course, men’s) occupations beyond the purely economic, and to examine women’s enterprising strategies to negotiate the parameters shaping their intellectual, cultural, emotional, and economic labours.
Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family to Nation
Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200 - 1920: Family, State and Church, ed. Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay, pp. 1-20, 2017
The relationship between ritual and the creation, maintenance and
destabilisation of power has no... more The relationship between ritual and the creation, maintenance and
destabilisation of power has not gone unexplored by historians, art historians and anthropologists, given the centrality of ritual to religious practice and to institutional structures both across time and throughout the world. Yet the place emotion holds in the relationship between ritual and power—indeed, that emotion should be one of the analytical tools historians turn to in order to understand power dynamics—has received less systematic attention. It is only recently that the emotions, rather than the ritual, have moved to the centre of the academic debate. This shift in focus has in part been motivated by Renato Rosaldo’s observation that some rituals are formed to manage emotions (such as grief) as much as rituals are designed to create emotion in the participants. It has also been influenced by a swathe of new methodologies and theoretical approaches emerging from across the humanities and social sciences that have rejuvenated investigations into what emotions are and how they work in organising, mediating and constructing social, cultural and institutional
relationships.
“thus of War, a Paradox I write”: Thomas Dekker and a Londoner’s View of War and Peace
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions, edited by Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch and Katrina O’Loughlin, pp. 89-105, 2019
War was a fashionable topic for the English presses in the early modern period. Reports on wars i... more War was a fashionable topic for the English presses in the early modern period. Reports on wars in Ireland, France and in the Netherlands made popular reading for English men and women, attested to in the growing proliferation of news pamphlets.. The appetite for news about war on the Continent was unsurprising given the close geographical and commercial ties between the English and the Dutch, as well as the ramifications conflict between Spain and the Dutch Republic had on English commercial and dynastic interests. With some speed, Thomas Dekker, who made a living writing professionally for London’s theatres and the printing presses, turned the threat of war and the close commercial and political interests between England and the Continent into scenes in his plays and pamphlets. Performed on stage and read by London audiences, Dekker’s writings became part of a culture of war writing in the early modern period.
In this chapter I examine how late-fifteenth century books published by William Caxton were part ... more In this chapter I examine how late-fifteenth century books published by William Caxton were part of a broader dialogue about social order and moral anxieties. Literature at this time reflected English political events and cultural changes particularly associated with England's loss of its French territories, the civil conflict created by the Wars of the Roses, and ongoing anxieties with royal stability. While escalating military and political intrigue were felt most strongly within inner royal and aristocratic circles, other social groups, particularly England's middling ranks of merchants and gentry responded in their own ways to anxieties and disorder in political rule. While this was often expressed at the level of concerns with the legitimacy of political governance and a supposed national moral decay, in many instances these anxieties were also translated into concerns with the good and proper upbringing of the next generation. It is possible to infer emotional states through the political and social fears felt inside mercantile and gentry communities and which were manifested as a heightened concern for moral standards. While we recognise that adult texts were reflecting English political events to an interested gentry and urban merchant audience, the circulation of related anxieties relevant to upbringing and childhood also flourished. This chapter integrates these two topics by exploring the late-fifteenth century instructional literature which contributed to debates about political and social order by promoting virtue and ethical conduct for gentry and merchants, and also inside family groups and for young people. Several mid-fifteenth century political manuscripts are first analysed to establish the level of interest in political events amongst a gentry and mercantile readership before Caxton's texts are introduced. His texts, many of which identify concerns with England's security and a sense of changing English identity, can be fruitfully studied for their contribution to the vogue for moral debate.
Is there a formula for courtesy? If we think of a formula as a conventional way of expressing som... more Is there a formula for courtesy? If we think of a formula as a conventional way of expressing something orally or in writing, or, in this instance as a set of behaviours that are deemed at any one time to be appropriate and fitting, then yes, we can clearly say there is a formula for courtesy. It is a convention that we greet people, that men and increasingly often, women, shake hands, and that we maintain eye contact when we are speaking. In the medieval period in England there was a similar belief in the importance of rules governing conduct. However, did this extend into a formulaic literature? Formulaic writings are identified through the use of words ‘regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea.’ As I, and others have commented, a formula can also be taken as a conventional statement of some fundamental principle. Do the courtesy poems written in the English vernacular during the late-fourteenth century through to the fifteenth century, meet such criteria that would class them as a ‘medieval formula’?
In this chapter I propose that we can see a formulaic quality in English vernacular courtesy literature, including set phrases and word groupings that are used, and certain syntactic patterns. My analysis of six English vernacular courtesy poems will fall into three parts. I will initially identify formulaic linguistic patterns, the repeated use of key words and phrases, and linguistic tags. This will be followed by an analysis of particular courtesy rules that are associated with this literature, to see if there was a literary ‘set’ of recognisable manners for readers to identify with. The last of the formulaic elements that I consider is the use of instantly recognisable ‘characters’ who perform the task of guiding readers towards certain conclusions. There is then the possibility for making some tentative suggestions for why, in particular, these formulaic patterns appeared in this literature.
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Book chapters by Merridee Bailey
women’s working lives that Women and Work in Premodern Europe,
c. 1100 – 1800 explores the interrelated perspectives of women’s experiences of work; their working relationships with other women, men, and God; and the cultural representation of women’s participation across various spheres of endeavour. This requires the integration of cultural, intellectual, and economic activities into the repertoire of what work means, and did mean, to women and men in the past. The temporal and geographic scope through which women and work are examined spans roughly 1100– 1800 and covers a large expanse of western Europe, including Germany, France and the Netherlands, and England. Throughout the volume, premodern is used as an inclusive term that refers to the period ranging from the medieval through to the latter phase of the early modern era.This volume has two aims: to demonstrate how a more encompassing concept of work extends to a variety of women’s (and of course, men’s) occupations beyond the purely economic, and to examine women’s enterprising strategies to negotiate the parameters shaping their intellectual, cultural, emotional, and economic labours.
destabilisation of power has not gone unexplored by historians, art historians and anthropologists, given the centrality of ritual to religious practice and to institutional structures both across time and throughout the world. Yet the place emotion holds in the relationship between ritual and power—indeed, that emotion should be one of the analytical tools historians turn to in order to understand power dynamics—has received less systematic attention. It is only recently that the emotions, rather than the ritual, have moved to the centre of the academic debate. This shift in focus has in part been motivated by Renato Rosaldo’s observation that some rituals are formed to manage emotions (such as grief) as much as rituals are designed to create emotion in the participants. It has also been influenced by a swathe of new methodologies and theoretical approaches emerging from across the humanities and social sciences that have rejuvenated investigations into what emotions are and how they work in organising, mediating and constructing social, cultural and institutional
relationships.
In this chapter I propose that we can see a formulaic quality in English vernacular courtesy literature, including set phrases and word groupings that are used, and certain syntactic patterns. My analysis of six English vernacular courtesy poems will fall into three parts. I will initially identify formulaic linguistic patterns, the repeated use of key words and phrases, and linguistic tags. This will be followed by an analysis of particular courtesy rules that are associated with this literature, to see if there was a literary ‘set’ of recognisable manners for readers to identify with. The last of the formulaic elements that I consider is the use of instantly recognisable ‘characters’ who perform the task of guiding readers towards certain conclusions. There is then the possibility for making some tentative suggestions for why, in particular, these formulaic patterns appeared in this literature.