![]() Women wore bras when clothing styles did not give an individual’s figure enough support without one. Everyone worked hard to present a tidy appearance to the world.Įxcept in hot weather, people slept in their underwear-c ap, underpants, and long, smock-like shirt for men and women. ![]() ![]() Perfumes and deodorants were sought out as they are today, as Absolon’s use of breath fresheners in the Miller’s Tale shows ( 3690). Men and women might shave or not, depending on fashion and personal preferences. Various qualities of soap were major imports to England in the later Middle Ages, supporting local production. ![]() In the General Prologue, the narrator seems impressed with how well the Prioress keeps her mouth and hands clean even while eating ( GP 118-62), and Alisoun is careful to wash her face after work in the Miller’s Tale (MilT 3307-11). At home, everyone kept hands and faces as scrupulously clean as they could and also endeavored to clean their teeth. A full hot bath was a rarer luxury than it is today, but medieval people bathed as frequently as possible, and in towns and cities public baths were popular. Though lacking indoor plumbing, they washed up just as we do. Once awake, medieval people went about their mornings much like you or I might. That is to say, they woke with their animals, with their neighbors, and perhaps to the tones of town clocks or church bells, if not to the tones of the nearest rooster (like Chaunticleer ) or cow needing milking. Most people, however, woke more or less with the sun. If you were a monk (though not if you were Chaucer’s Monk! ) or a nun like Chaucer’s Prioress (who sang the divine service well ) you would wake during the night to rise with your fellows and pray in church, before going back to sleep again for a few more hours. In the Middle Ages, what time you woke up depended a lot on who you were. We might start by waking up in the morning. As with all history, then, we want to begin by being aware that we are overgeneralizing and missing some details as we go, especially since this is just a short textbook overview and not an entire argument-driven book on the subject. In fact, gaps in evidence and interpretation mean that there is a degree to which we cannot even know just how different things were. However, a bit like science fiction, the way Chaucer went to work, the kind of clothes that he wore, and the food that he ate might be different than today. We still have families and friends and coworkers. We still go to work, eat food, wear clothes, and some of us attend church. Most things in Chaucer’s everyday life still exist today. When it comes to daily life, historians are assisted by the fact that, in some respects, daily life has not changed very much. But historians keep trying to narrow the gap by finding more and more evidence and interpreting the evidence better and better over time. We can never know everything perfectly about the past, so there is always a little bit of fiction in every piece of history writing. Historians take as much evidence as they can find and try to construct a likely scenario with it. Sometimes, social historians take literature and art into account too. Social historians look for textual evidence in legal documents, such as wills and tax records, and for physical evidence, such as architecture and objects recovered during archaeological excavations. Writing about daily life in Chaucer’s era can be accomplished using techniques, that is, methodology, developed by social historians. Kennedy A reference chapter from The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (September 2017) Everyday Life in Late Medieval England Kathleen E.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |