Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape

Overview

This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages between c. 1086 and c. 1348 to determine how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. This new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants' economic experiences, and the construction of communal and individual memory, and reclaims significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.

Author Biography

Susan Kilby is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Name-Studies at the University of Nottingham.