Abstract
Social representations in later medieval culture have attracted little attention amongst psychologists, pre-dating the development of the so-called ‘public sphere’ in the eighteenth century. In addition, the association of pre-modern societies with ‘traditional’ modes of communication in social psychology places implicit limits on areas that may be studied through the lens of social representation theory. This article analyses the way in which knowledge circulated in late medieval society, noting initially the plural nature of representations of events and marginal groups, and the myriad channels through which beliefs were consolidated. In later medieval England perceptions of the past depended on collective and group memory, with customary rights and local histories forged through ‘common knowledge’, hearsay and the opinions of ‘trustworthy men’ of the village. The final section of this commentary provides an analysis of testimony from the late medieval church courts, in which witnesses articulated gender ideologies that reflected perceptions drawn from everyday life. Social representations of women were thus deployed in ecclesiastical suits, on the one hand supporting evidence of female witnesses and on the other justifying misogynistic stereotypes of women’s behaviour.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Archival sources Borthwick Institute for Archives (B.I.), University of York CP. E series CP. F. series
Aers, D. (1988). Community, gender, and individual identity: English writing, 1360–1430. London: Routledge.
Bardsley, S. (2006). Venomous tongues: Speech and gender in late medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Barron, C. (1989). The ‘golden age of women’ in late medieval London. Women in Southern England: Reading Medieval Studies, 15, 35–58.
Beattie, C. (2006). Medieval single women: The politics of social classification in late medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, J. M. (1997). Theoretical issues: confronting continuity. Journal of Women’s History, 9, 73–94.
Bloch, M. (1973). The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (trans: Anderson, J.E.). London: Routledge
Bloor, D. (2000). Whatever happened to ‘social constructiveness’? In A. Saito (Ed.), Bartlett, culture and cognition (pp. 194–216). Guildford: Psychology Press.
Boccaccio, G. (1972). The Decameron (Trans: McWilliams, G.H.). London: Penguin.
Brundage, J. A. (2008). The medieval origins of the legal profession: Canonists, civilians and courts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Butler, S. M. (2007). The language of abuse: Marital violence in later medieval England. Leiden: Brill.
Carruthers, M. (1990). The book of memory: A study of memory in medieval culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, S. (1985). The annales historians. In Q. Skinner (Ed.), The return of grand theory in the human sciences (pp. 177–198). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohn, S. K. (2002). The black death: end of a paradigm. The American Historical Review, 107(3), 703–738.
Confino, A. (1997). Collective memory and cultural history: problems of method. The American Historical Review, 102(5), 1386–1403.
Connerton, P. (1989). How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
d’Avray, D. (2001). Medieval marriage sermons: Mass communication in a culture without print. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Rosa, A. S. (1987). The social representations of mental illness in children and adults. In W. Doise & S. Moscovici (Eds.), Current issues in social psychology (pp. 47–138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dobson, B. (1991). Contrasting chronicles: historical writing at York and Durham at the close of the middle ages. In I. Wood & G. A. Loud (Eds.), Church and chronicle in the middle ages: Essays presented to John Taylor (pp. 211–218). London: Hambledon Press.
Donahue, C., & Adams, N. (1981). Select cases from the ecclesiastical courts of the Province of Canterbury, c. 1200–1301, Selden Society Publications (Vol. 95). London: Selden Society.
Eiser, J. R. (1986). Social psychology: Attitudes, cognition and social behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fentress, J., & Wickham, C. (1992). Social memory. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
Frevert, U. (2011). Emotions in history. Lost and found. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Goldberg, P. J. P. (1992). Women, work and life cycle in a medieval economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, P. J. P. (1999). Masters and men in later medieval England. In D. M. Hadley (Ed.), Masculinity in medieval Europe (pp. 56–70). London and New York: Longman.
Goldberg, P. J. P. (2007). Gender and matrimonial litigation in the church courts of later medieval England. Gender and History, 19(1), 43–59.
Gowing, L. (1996). Domestic dangers: Women, words, and sex in early modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Green, M. (2008). Making women’s medicine masculine: The rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT.
Helmholz, R. H. (1974). Marriage litigation in medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Höijer, B. (2010). Emotional anchoring and objectification in the media reporting on climate change. Public Understanding of Science, 19(6), 717–731.
Höijer, B. (2011). Social representations theory: a new theory for media research. Nordicom Review, 32(2), 3–16.
Horrox, R. (1994). Ed. and Trans. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Iggers, G. (1997). Historiography in the twentieth century: From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Iggers, G. (2012). Review of André Burguière, the annales school. An intellectual history. Enterprise and Society, 13(1), 221–224.
Joffé, H. (1999). Risk and ‘the other’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kane, B. (2007). Personal memory, collective testimony and masculinity in the late medieval church court of York. Marginalia, 5 Trial and Tribulation.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Higgins, E. T. (Eds.). (2007). Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles. New York: Guildford Press.
László, J. (2008). The science of stories: An introduction to narrative psychology. Hove and New York: Routledge.
Lloyd, B., & Duveen, G. (1990). A semiotic analysis of the development of social representations of gender. In G. Duveen & B. Lloyd (Eds.), Social representations and the development of knowledge (pp. 27–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marková, I. (2012). Method and explanation in history and in social representations. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 46(4).
Milstone, N. (2012). Historicising common sense. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 46(4).
Moscovici, S. (1973). Foreword. In C. Herzlich (Ed.), Health and illness: A social psychological analysis. New York: Academic.
Moscovici, S. (1988). Notes towards a definition of social representations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 18(3), 211–250.
Nirenberg, D. (1996). Communities of violence: Persecution of minorities in the middle ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Perry, A.J. (1925). Ed., Dialogus inter militem et clericum, Richard fitzRalph’s Sermon: ‘Defensio Curatorum’ and Methodius: ‘the Begynnyng of the Worlde and the Ende of Worldes’ by John Trevisa, EETS, 167. London: Milford.
Power, E. (1934). On medieval history as a social study. Economica, 1(1), 13–29.
Reddy, W. M. (2001). The navigation of feeling. A framework for the history of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rhodes, R. C. (1978). Emile Durkheim and the historical thought of Marc Bloch. Theory and Society, 5, 45–73.
Riddy, F. (1996). Mother knows best: reading social change in a courtesy text. Speculum, 71(1), 66–86.
Rigby, S. H. (2000). Gendering the black death: women in later medieval England. Gender in History, 12(3).
Rosenwein, B. H. (2002). Worrying about emotions in history. The American Historical Review, 107, 821–845.
Rosenwein, B. H. (2006). Emotional communities in the early middle ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rubin, M. (1998). Gentile tales: The narrative assault on late medieval jews. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient. London: Penguin.
Sandall, S. (2012). Representing rebellion: memory and social conflict in sixteenth-century England. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 46(4).
Slunecko, T., & Hengl, S. (2007). Language, cognition, subjectivity: a dynamic constitution. In J. Valsiner & A. Rosa (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology (pp. 40–61). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smail, D. L. (2003). The consumption of justice: Emotions, publicity, and legal culture in Marseille, 1264–1423. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sugiman, T., Gergen, K. J., Wagner, W., & Yamada, Y. (2007). The social turn in the science of human action. In Sugiman, Gergen, Wagner, & Yamada (Eds.), Meaning in action: Constructions, narratives and representations (pp. 1–20). New York: Springer.
Tanner, H. J. (2007). Henry I’s administrative legacy: the significance of place-date distribution in the acta of Kin Stephen. In D. F. Fleming & J. M. Pope (Eds.), Henry I and the Anglo-Norman world: Studies in memory of C. Warren Hollister (pp. 183–199). Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Valsiner, J., & Rosa, A. (Eds.). (2007). The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Voelklein, C., & Howarth, C. (2005). A review of controversies about social representations theory: a British debate. Culture and Psychology, 11(4), 431–454.
Warren, W. L. (1973). Henry II. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the fellowship that facilitated the research presented in this article. I am also very grateful to the editors of this special edition for leading the workshops and meetings that have led to its publication.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kane, B. Social Representations of Memory and Gender in Later Medieval England. Integr. psych. behav. 46, 544–558 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9220-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9220-0