Chapter 3 focuses on the kinds of domestic duties expected of women in gentle, noble, and royal establishments and thus offers an understanding of everyday life in a late medieval elite household. The range of activities required of highborn household servants was broad, encompassing both public and private obligations. They saw to their queens’ or noblewomen’s personal needs in terms of apparel, entertainment, and piety. They traveled when duties demanded it and assisted their queens and ladies with medical care. To perform these tasks, they were entrusted with significant household resources and also, sometimes, care and custody of royal and noble children. Over years of service, through daily serving the needs of their employers, some serving women and their mistresses developed affectionate relationships as they shared literary tastes and devotional practices. Their employment provided opportunities for elite female servants to live a sumptuous lifestyle surrounded by luxury and entertainments, and also to network with other courtiers. I argue that investigating the domestic duties and daily lives of these often-overlooked women completes our understanding of courts and great households by showing the importance of female employment in the Middle Ages.

This chapter provides an introduction to the use of mobile sensing in social and personality psychology. It first looks at mobile sensing’s historical roots and discusses how, in the field, the method follows in the footsteps of other traditional approaches to the collection of behavioral data. It then covers research questions of the kind that mobile sensing lends itself to, and provides a high-level summary of the current literature on mobile sensing. In the third section, the chapter illustrates the very basic how-to of mobile sensing with respect to technical rationale, implementation in studies, and coverage of variables. The fourth and final section is a psychometric reflection on where mobile sensing currently stands and where it is or should be going. To this end, five predictions are evaluated that were made for mobile sensing research when it first emerged in the psychological research landscape about a decade ago.

This chapter provides an overview of the conditions and experiences of the 22 million people who lived on farms and who inhabited the villages and small towns in the countryside during the revolution. The relationship between these people and revolutionary legislators in Paris was one of negotiation, confrontation and dialogue. This chapter will highlight how rural dwellers adopted, adapted and resisted change from the capital. It discusses the cahiers de doléances, not only as they represent a decisive moment of mass politicization, but also because they emphasize so very well the concerns, hopes and fears of the majority of the population. The chapter also pays attention to the various waves of peasant insurrection – against feudalism and taxation – during 1789-1793. A balance sheet is drawn up for the outcomes of the French Revolution for the rural population, which reveals that changes in family life, religious practices and socio-economic relations combined to fundamentally alter the mental universe of all French citizens.

Food, clothing, and commerce

My objective in this chapter is to investigate these questions through the examination of the relationship between society and the city in nineteenth-century Tehran. This relationship focuses on the spatiality of ordinary people’s daily lives. Social theories of space have become a common domain for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers as a means to investigate socio-spatial processes. In this chapter, I unfold this theoretical framework and explain the impact of the spatial approach on social and historical examinations of cities before presenting the main empirical analysis of daily life and social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran. My objective is to socialize the spatial analysis and, more importantly, to spatialize the social analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between urban society and Tehran in the nineteenth century. It examines people’s everyday lives in the city and their religious and non-religious spatial practices. It investigates various social spaces of day-to-day interactions in the city. I start by presenting a social analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century. Afterwards, I examine social spaces in two main categories: spaces based on religious gatherings and spaces based on nonreligious practices. This chapter ends with the examination of women’s social life and spaces in the city.

This chapter imagines an ordinary day in the life of a female monastic community in twelfth-century Germany. The chapter, like the monastic day, is organized around the celebration of the monastic liturgy of the hours. Between the liturgical hours in the oratory, the nuns attend to their daily business in the cloister, chapter house, lavatory, refectory, and workshops. The flow and activities of this monastic day are based primarily on the Rule of St. Benedict, the customary of Hirsau, and Hildegard of Bingen’s own commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, as well as on archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence that reflects medieval monastic lifeways.

Though millennia of building and rebuilding in the city center have affected archaeologists’ ability to recover domestic architecture and assemblages from the Archaic and Classical periods, the evidence which does survive provides a window into the daily lives of ordinary Athenians. Ancient Athenian houses hosted many activities, including family life, ritual practice, and craft production.

Edith Wharton’s personal letters have become integral to an understanding of Wharton’s life and literary production. Because of elements central to most academic projects, however, scholars are rarely able to embrace the many and varied aspects of Wharton which her letters reveal. Re-examining the letters offers a gallery of newly detailed Whartons, including the athletic teenager and happy new wife, the author who sometimes expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and classist views, and the world traveler who was domestically homey. Further, the letters demonstrate their own importance in her life: they were the means through which she maintained friendships (including those with the Berensons and with Gaillard Lapsley) that were vital to her emotional well-being. The letters reveal Wharton creating literary masterpieces and getting through the challenges of history and of everyday existence; they also demonstrate her thorough literariness, inventiveness, and humor. The re-examined personal letters offer a complex, contradictory, irreducible Wharton.

The history of temple buildings in the Great Oasis shows periods of intense activity alternating with periods of relative quiet. When seen in combination with the varying amounts of archaeological remains over time, this data allows us to chart the development of contacts between the oases and the Nile Valley. In particular, this has consequences for the times of the Libyan conflicts of the 19th Dynasty. This chapter argues that the oases were in Libyan hands during this time, after which the Egyptian army re-established control. Two dated finds from the temple at Amheida, Dakhla, are of particular interest for this discussion. A stela of Seti II marks building works at Amheida shortly after the wars of Merenptah, and a fragment of relief dated to Ramesses IX sheds light on the incursions of Libyans into the Nile Valley at that time.

Only a few of the cemeteries in the Great Oasis from Ptolemaic and Roman times have been published: Kellis (Dakhla), Dush, Labakha, El-Deir (Kharga). There are mainly family tombs, often reused. People are usually mummified. In every cemetery funerary equipment was present (painted coffins and cartonnages, painted or gilded masks), as well as votive offerings, mainly ceramics. Traditional Egyptian practices were preserved till major changes in the late third to fourth century AD. Individual pit-graves normally disposed west/east took the place of collective tombs; mummification was practiced, but many bodies were naturally dried out; funerary equipment became rare (no coffins nor cartonnages). This new type of funerary practice is related to Christianisty’s expansion. A funerary textile is an archaeological object and must be studied in its context. At El-Deir we can follow the tradition and the changes, also thanks to the textiles. The three fibers highlighted on the site are flax, cotton, and wool. They reflect the evolution of funerary practices and daily life, and their economy, and pose questions on the origin and appearance of textile novelties, during a complex period, in a specific context.