In these pages we have witnessed the deep degree to which architectural rebuilding, as a practice distinct from new construction, was embedded in the Roman patronage system and served as powerful social currency in cities throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries spanning the early imperial to late antique periods. Overall, architectural rebuilding continued to be publicly celebrated as an honorific virtue through the sixth century, though the reach and impact of architectural euergetism shrank as patronage patterns changed, the overall volume of architectural construction declined, and spending on it was increasingly directed toward ecclesiastical and monastic architecture. This, I suggest, was principally due to the unique ways in which rebuilding leveraged site- and audience-specific connections to past and future communities. The high public value placed on rebuilding was also due to the opportunities it offered emperors, bishops, and other patrons to inflect cyclical celebratory calendars that enacted present order and implied future stability through their regular renewal and reperformance. While events of architectural destruction sorely tested that stability and regularly signaled divine displeasure to contemporaries, rebuilding concomitantly asserted current and future security through the reaffirmation (and simultaneous opportunity for reframing) of the empire’s pious relationship to their god(s).

Chapter 2, a pendant to the first, argues for the importance of temple anniversaries and other festivals associated with rebuilding for writing, experiencing, and synthesizing chronologies in time and space at the lived, local level.

This chapter takes the province of Normandy, a pays détat with its own provincial estates and bailiwick assemblies, to demonstrate how political language and vocabulary evolved in the sixteenth century from an emphasis on the common good (le bien public) to a more royalist language of the good of the state (bien dÉtat). The crown had given the province a Charter outlining its rights and privileges in the fourteenth century. The crown also gave the provinces principal city, Rouen, a charter. Becasue of customary law, however, consenting to taxation by the Estates of Normandy had become established custom in the province by the sixteenth century even though it ws not mentioned specifically in the Norman Charter. Thus, royal efforts to emphasize the nation State in its vocabulary challenged the custom of consent to taxation.

This chapter demostrates with town council deliberations and records from other local assemblies that political discourse and complaints at the very local level mirrored those in bailiwick assemblies , provincial estates, and meetings of the Estates General, and they reliably reflect public opinion. It shows that national complaints came from the bottom-up, both in rural as well as urban areas.

This chapter approach consumption inequalities among the Valencian peasantry from two different perspectives. The first one measures inequality in the distribution of food-related goods across peasant families. The second one classifies peasants using animal ownership as a wealth indicator, in order to explore the relation between wealth and consumption inequality. The chapter argues that the proliferation of goods took place among various strata of the peasantry, although certainly not with the same intensity.

In this chapter, the chronological and geographical distribution of the probate inventories under examination are addressed, and they are classified as to key variables, like the occupation of the deceased, their gender, and the reason for production of the inventory. Some of this information – particularly the reason for the making of the lists – will be used to assess the existence of biases of wealth and age. The argument of this chapter is that Valencian inventories overcome most of the problems that have been identified for their quantitative use in other countries. As far as the late medieval period is concerned, Valencian lists of goods provide, in terms of their abundance, exhaustiveness, and precision, some of the best sets of inventories for Europe as a whole.

The book’s final chapter turns to questions of spolia and converted buildings. Its discussion reorients conventional approaches to these debated topics by exploring architectural reuse through the lens of lived experience. Focusing on evidence for original doorways blocked in later phases of a building’s occupation at a series of repurposed sites, a case is made for studying conspicuous traces of a building’s former use as a window into social and somatic modes of temporality not captured by official commemorative inscriptions or building histories.

This chapter examines the local bailiwick assemblies where deputies for the Third Estate were selected for meetings of the Estates General. The town of Provins and the larger region of Champagne are used here as an extended example of how these assemblies operated and how they expressed themselves in deciding what were the principal issues to present to the crown.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the specificities of ‘peasant manners’, defining how peasants ate and drank and the objects involved with doing so. Once food was cooked it was ready to be served, and this required the usage of table service items. Most of these are not conceptually different from modern ones: medieval society needed plates, glasses, cutlery, and jugs, and peasants were not different in that sense. Yet the abundance of these various objects and how they were used was particular to that epoch. These practices for serving food must be established to fully understand how changes in consumption took place within a culturally defined, specific system of customs. This chapter argues that eating and drinking practices generated a set of utensils not only concerned with subsistence, but often with comfort and decorum.

This chapter assesses the situation surrounding peasant incomes in the period under analysis. This involves, firstly, placing an updated estimate of Valencian real wages in a European context. Once presented, trends in real wages help to give a sense of the overall dynamics of purchasing power that society experienced in the kingdom of Valencia. Secondly, the evidence provided by inventories of peasants themselves with respect to selected wealth assets – land and animal ownership – are used to explore the contribution of these resources to their incomes over time.