HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Abstract

The history of everyday life is predominantly a child of German historical research of the 1970s and 1980s. On one hand, it grew particularly as an opposition to traditional political history; on the other, to the Gesellschaftsgeschichte, with its emphasis on structures and processes, and its grand analytical concepts like industrialization, class formation, nation-building, etc. The earliest research efforts of historians of everyday life concentrated on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the subjective side of the past: how people experienced, perceived and acted upon their world.1 Micro-historical studies have played an important role. Besides, the phenomena of routine, repetitiveness and habitus have also become main directions of new interests.2 Historians of the Middle Ages started dealing with everyday life a bit later, and with less theoretical and methodological background and emphasis.3 Nevertheless, the concentration on routine and the repetitive also proved to be important for any kind of (comparative) analysis.4 It is for this reason that the application of computer-supported methods became relevant at an early stage, particularly concerning the documentation, usage and interdisciplinary analysis of especially late medieval 'mass-sources': of written evidence, like account books, testaments, chronicles, etc., as well as of pictorial sources and also, to a lesser degree, of archeological material, all of them being equally important for research into the field.5 To cope with the language of signs hidden in the sources and being the basis for any kind of analysis, studies into terminology, the detailedness, the structure, hierarchy and interrelatedness, and the connotation of information have been indispensable. The advantage of source-oriented data processing led a larger number of research projects applying 'kleio' and its forerunners, developed by Manfred Thaller at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte at Gottingen and, more recently, at the