Examining Temporality and Difference: an Intensive Approach to Understanding Medieval Rural Settlement

Abstract

A new theoretical approach to medieval rural settlement, built on the concept of intensity, is proposed. It is argued that analysing settlements as intensive spaces creates new opportunities to explore the emergence of difference in medieval lived experience. The approach is intended to overcome the challenges posed by approaches to medieval architecture framed by binary divisions (e.g. inside/outside). Drawing on posthuman thought, it is argued that such divisions constrain the understanding of how and why difference emerged in the past. The paper advances this approach through its application to the study of house construction and domestic economy in the medieval village of Hangleton, England. It is proposed that difference emerges as everyday practices are performed in constantly changing material environments, generating situationally grounded but varied experiences of rurality. Rather than being subject to macro-scale economic processes, this approach allows us to understand historical change as a patchwork of localised interactions which overflowed the bounds of communities or regions.

Assembling a household in the Middle Nile Valley (Old Dongola, Sudan) in the 16th–17th centuries

“…Presently, a household is commonly identified as a social unit defined by the activities and behaviour of co-resident groups extending beyond the space of the house (Beaudry, 2015; Bolender and Johnson, 2016: 66). Thus, households may comprise collectives entangled with other social groups from outside the house, e.g., in the forms of agrarian or craft production, rather than units defined by co-residence (see Jervis, 2022). This paper draws on the notion that houses, as well as people inhabiting them and all the objects and relations holding them together, make up heterogenous assemblages (DeLanda, 2016: 20) that mutually constitute one another (Hutson, 2010: 112).…”