Material culture and self-presentation in Late Medieval England

This study shows how material culture played a major part in strategies of self-presentation among people in late medieval English society. During life official groups documented this best, but postmortem, individuals' attitudes become clear by examining their wills. Close analysis of bequests shows that socioeconomic status, gender, and clerical status all affected the ways in which individuals used objects to indicate their position in society.;The connections between material culture and self-presentation manifest most clearly in apparel. Clothing could signify gender, clerical status, estate, and wealth simultaneously, and was considered so important that sumptuary laws regulated it. Most individuals at all socioeconomic levels obeyed this legislation. Chapters 2 through 4 analyze the bequest patterns of artisans, merchants and professionals, and the gentry and nobility, and find that few persons of any status significantly transgressed sumptuary laws.;The choice of heirs was also significant. The evidence shows that heirs outside the kindred and household most often inherited tokens or mementos. Heirs with close personal connections to the deceased frequently acquired practical chattels to be used for purposes such as dowries, setting up households, or establishing independent businesses. The bequest patterns imply that testators strategically chose what to leave their heirs so as to reinforce and at times perhaps enhance the heirs' own social status and economic future. They also generally kept goods within the socioeconomic sphere.;Gender did not produce the same limitations: men did not try to limit their bequests to other men, nor women to other women. While gender was certainly significant in terms of owning material goods and using them for self-presentation, it seems overall to have been less important than socioeconomic status, as chapter 5 concludes. Clerics had some preference for other clerics when bequeathing their chattels, but socioeconomic factors still prove to have been significant among the clerics, as shown in chapter 6. The status group within the greater lay-clerical divide continued to be key for these men, whereas the gender divide more often was superseded in importance by the external status or socioeconomic group.