Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The tendency of people to live in communities is as old as organized society itself. Aristotle saw that the family constituted the primary building block of all societies, and he worked upwards from there to extol the importance of social groupings which were increasingly large and complex. Along with the need for security, the imperative for social and economic interaction has been the prime motivator for such comings together, indeed for the formation of most sorts of communities. A discussion of this issue might take many forms, as (with rare exceptions) single individuals always belonged to several groups, many of them arranged in concentric patterns. The town butcher belonged to his family, both immediate and extended, but also probably to his parish, his fraternity or religious guild prior to the Reformation, his craft guild, the town's freemanry and perhaps one of its governing councils, the town in a broader sense, the hundred, the county, the nation and so forth. Both the butcher and his wife also belonged to gender groups. Many activities were exclusively reserved for either men or women, and even group activities, such as worship, were experienced differently by each gender. Recent scholarship has begun exploring the gendered nature of those roles, with the roles of women, as we see in Anne Laurence's essay (chapter 22), being given particular prominence. In designing ... log in or subscribe to read full text