Moving from revised buildings’ monumental texts to their material surfaces and spatial arrangements, the book’s final section expands our investigation into "unmarked" ways in which new contexts reframed old elements. Chapter 7 argues that change over time was regularly characterized and symbolized in terms of vividly contrasting architectural substances, in which marble (especially) was used to chart (and critique) urban progress and to modulate a balance between tradition and innovation.

Storage was needed in peasant economies for various purposes: feeding the household, ensuring supply in times of shortage, and, besides, accumulating surpluses to be sold in the market for cash. With the latter, peasants paid rents and taxes, serviced debts, and purchased goods. Storage was thus a cornerstone in the process of transformation of a production factor and wealth asset – land – into monetary incomes for consumption but also an aid for the subsistence of the household. In this chapter, we explore the vast constellation of possessions peasants used for storing their foodstuffs: their materials, appearances, and the everyday practices around them. The constant tension between supplying home and the market ensured that these items, of minute relevance in our modern material culture, accounted for a significant part of the material culture of medieval peasant food.

This chapter turns to a sample of peasant and ‘non peasant’ decedents together to focus on three different perspectives: on consumption by occupation, comparing peasant and non-peasant consumers; on place of residence, comparing dwellers from towns and from villages of various sizes, regardless of their occupation; and on the gender of the deceased. The chapter argues that the changes observed in the material culture of food among the peasantry were also experienced by Valencian society as a whole, more significantly among wealthier individuals, among town dwellers, and among women.

The suite of chapters comprising Part II homes in on monumental building inscriptions as central means through which individual buildings shaped perceptions of their own architectural histories and of temporal change more broadly. The first of these, Chapter 4, investigates assemblages of epigraphic records of architectural interventions that accumulated on buildings over their long ancient lives. The chapter’s analysis of these encrusted epigraphic environments charts a range of strategies that benefactors adopted in setting up their own commemorative texts vis à vis those of earlier patrons and considers the effects of those decisions on the inscriptions’ reception by contemporary audiences.

This chapter addressed a variety of changes that often took place at the level of specific goods or typologies of goods. Out of the complex constellation of individual object stories a richer material culture of food emerged, consisting of a higher level of possession or diffusion of already existing objects. This phenomenon shaped a more specialised and diverse material culture of food, which unfolded within the complex system of practices of usage defined in earlier parts of this book.

This chapter examines political discourse at various meetings of the Estates General between 1561 and 1589. it shows the evolution from an emphasis on the common good (bien public) to the good of the state (bien détat). This new language of the royal state was introduced in the 1576 meeting at Blois, but it became even more widely used in the 1588–1589 meeting of the Estates General, also at Blois.

This book is designed for readers interested in the rise of absolutism in seventeenth-century France, as well as those interested in language and political discourse of this period. It demonstrates how the political discourse in the late Middle Ages, based on ancient Roman ideas that government existed for the common good (le bien public, or la chose publique, a French translation of the Latin res publica), began to evolve in the 1570s. Though references to the common good continued to be used right up to the French Revolution, they began to be overtaken by the language of the State (le bien de l’État). This evolution in language existed at every social level from the peasant village up to the royal court, and they accompanied the rise of absolutism in France, as the book demonstrates by analyzing scores of local, regiona,l and national lists of grievances presented to provincial estates and the Estates-General.