Rural salvation markets

(forthcoming book)

Abstract: Memoria, the liturgic commemoration of the dead, is used in this study as a unifying perspective
on the economic, social, and cultural aspects of village life in the late medieval northern Low Countries.
A sample of 55 rural parishes of which local memoria registers have been preserved is analysed to find
out how rural ‘salvation markets’ developed, how kinship, social stratifications, and translocal networks
were reflected in these registers, and how liturgy and loyalties shaped medieval villages as ‘imagined
communities’ in which care for the salvation of deceased villagers played a major role.