Sensory Experiences in the Medieval Urban Household
Dr Chris King
Chris King is an Associate Professor in Archaeology at the University of Nottingham, and a Council Member of the Vernacular Architecture Group. He is an expert in medieval towns and particularly the study of standing buildings and the use and meaning of space in urban houses. He has worked extensively on buildings and archaeology in the city of Norwich, one of England’s most important medieval trading centres, recently published as a monograph Houses and Society in Norwich 1350-1660: Urban Buildings in the Age of Transition (Boydell 2020).
About the event
The medieval urban household was a complex web of social and material connections, in which identities and relationships were forged through lived bodily experience. By bringing together the evidence of architecture, material culture and documentary sources we can explore the sensory qualities of medieval homes. Urban dwellings created networks of spaces, objects and socially embedded practices and performances, and in turn these encoded a range of ideas about status, and gender, work and leisure, privacy and comfort, health, and religious meaning for medieval townspeople, which we can explore through an archaeology of lived experience.