Mapping networks and knowledge in medieval Marseille, 1337-1362: Variations on a theme of mobility.

This is an archival study of the organization of society, memory, and knowledge in medieval Marseille in the decades surrounding the Black Death, and is based on a broad array of notarial, rental, and judicial records and a database of 14,000 individuals created through record linkages. This database has made it possible to probe behind the superficial meaning of medieval documentation, to explore with unprecedented clarity the deep social and geographical context inherent in any transaction. A central argument is that medieval urban societies were not characterized by the rigid, dense, and constraining ties of association and intimate knowledge deemed typical of premodern or traditional societies. Instead, to judge by the ease with which Marseille accommodated the loss of a third of its population after the Black Death, men and women were adept at refashioning networks of mutual aid and intimacy, primarily through the creation of new affinal ties, friendships, and professional associations. The structures of stability that can be found in the sources--structures such as agnatic kinship, patrimonialism, and domesticity--were ideologies clothing a world marked by its mobility and fluidity. This was a society remarkable chiefly for the broad social and geographical extent of its networks of association. Six chapters explore the response to the plague, the solvent effect of dotal rights on patrimonial holdings, the affinal component of factional recruitment, neighborhood identities, urban networks of marriage, friendship, and affinal kinship, and the spatial, social, and gender distribution of knowledge. This thesis proposes a wholly new way of approaching and studying medieval urban society, and offers an understanding of how the accretions of social theory over decades and centuries have continued to obscure not only the middle ages, but also the very ways in which we ask our questions of it.Ph.D.European historyGeographyMedieval historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129386/2/9501035.pd