Rural salvation markets

Abstract:

Memoria, the liturgic commemoration of the dead, figures in this study as a unifying perspective on the economic, social, and cultural aspects of village life in the late medieval northern Low Countries.

Against the background of Erik Thoen’s model of social agrosystems, a set of 56 rural parishes of which local memoria registers have been preserved is analysed.

This study shows, among other aspects, 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.

Rural salvation markets: medieval memoria in Dutch village parishes appeared on October 11th, 2019, in Historia Agriculturae, a series founded in 1953 by the Netherlands Agricultural Historical Institute (NAHI), and is available here.