The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities, and they question straightforward narratives of the Middle Ages, as a period of progress from irrational to rational, from primitive to complex and sophisticated or as a time of lay action and clerical thought. They highlight the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. The essays range chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.
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