Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how increased consumption in the aftermath of the Black Death reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come. Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Katherine L. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

The volume represents the second part of Rosenthal's cataloging of historical scholarship on Ricardian, Lancastrian, and Yorkist England, covering categories from political and legal history to social and intellectual history and the arts. As Rosenthal notes in the introduction, its size (1,888 entries for the decade) hardly gives much support to those who warn us of the imminent demise of the more traditional lines of historical endeavor and inquiry.

Discussions of the relationship between gender and religion most often focus attention on female religious figures. In redressing this bias, this collection of fourteen essays, taken from a conference held at the University of Huddersfield in 2001, examines how medieval masculinity related to concepts of holiness. Contents include: Sexual prowess, the battle for chastity and monastic identity (J Murray); Masculine identity in mystic marriages (C D Muir); Masculinity and eunuch saints in Byzantium (S Tougher); Holiness and masculinity in the Lives of Anglo-Saxon martyr-kings (E Christie); Monarchy, martyrdom and masculinity: England in the later Middle Ages (W M Ormrod) .

Medieval London Widows, 1300-1500 shows that it is possible to expand the repertoire of examples of medieval women with personalities and individuality beyond the well-known triad of Margaret Paston, Margery Kempe and the Wife of Bath. The rich documentation of London records allows these women to speak for themselves. They do so largely through their wills, which themselves exemplify the ability of widows to make choices and to order their lives.

Vol. 13 (index) prepared by Wm. J. Richardson Associates, Inc. Includes bibliographical references.

Aby Sue Margeson A huge finds' report with objects grouped by function or by trade. Everything is here: dress and dress accessories, furnishings and household equipment, door and window furniture and fittings for buildings, tools and debris associated with trades and industry, musical instruments, games and pastimes. Includes wood and glass vessels but not pottery (for that see Eighteen centuries of pottery from Norwich by Sarah Jennings, EAA 13, 1981. Now reduced to only #9.95.). The increasing number of these Medieval finds reports from different parts of the country should lead soon to some regional syntheses. For instance there is not much weaponry in Norwich! (East Anglian Archaeology 58, 1993)

J. L. McIntosh argues that Mary I and Elizabeth I were authority figures before they acceded to the English throne. As independent heads of households and property owners, the Tudor princesses attained a social and political status usually reserved for elite men, showing that women could achieve agency through the management of an elite household. Drawing on their household archives, McIntosh recounts how the Tudor princesses attracted political clients, challenged royal authority, and established a recognizable political profile by exploiting the resources of servants, estates, and material culture. Her research proves that "exceptional" women can offer insights into the opportunities available to other contemporary women and that the elite household was a foundational element in identity formation.