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Project

Generational conflicts: household and kin relations in the late medieval Low Countries

Although historians tend to agree that adolescence existed as an acknowledged life stage in the late Middle Ages already, there is no consensus on how young people experienced it and what parent-adolescent relationships entailed in these days. Whereas some scholars argue for the household’s patriarchal and authoritarian identity, others have argued that, at least in cities, adolescents enjoyed a remarkable degree of agency to make their own choices. To resolve this debate, this project examines conflicts and interactions between junior and senior relatives in the late medieval Low Countries. Other studies have exclusively focused on urban women’s economic agency and on prescriptive medieval views on parent-child relationships. This project overcomes the one-sided approach of previous research by studying which forms adolescence and intergenerational relationships took for men and women from different social backgrounds in both a rural and an urban context. To do so, a variety of legal records which shed light on actual practice, will be examined.
Date:15 Dec 2020 →  31 Oct 2021
Keywords:family, adolescence, law and litigation, conflict management, patriarchy
Disciplines:Medieval history