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It has sometimes been argued that the larger regional formations of the 15th century resulted in greater market integration. It is a contentious argument, and one that is difficult to apply to Lucca—precisely because Lucca never made the political transformation on which the argument is based. In so far as the thesis contains an implicit comparison between city‐ and regional state, 15th‐century Lucca fits quite neatly into the conventional image of the former. Laws continued to be passed that banned all artisanal and retail activity in the Sei Miglia. Legislation was less restrictive with regard to some of the small towns in the vicariates. But here, too, state policy aimed to confine rural manufacture to the production of goods and necessities for local peasant consumption—a fact that the chapter has tried to reconcile with the manufacture of quality goods for export that was actually taking place in some of the larger centres. The chapter ends with a social history of the vicariates; an examination of mountain civilization; and with a reassessment of community identity even amongst villagers of the Lucchese plain.

In earlier chapters, political, administrative, social, and economic ingredients were forged into an integrated history of the developing Lucchese state. For purposes of a more detailed analysis, the political and administrative features of the 15th‐century Lucchesia have been separated from social and economic issues. This chapter looks at the mature political and administrative entity that was 15th‐century Lucca. By the mid‐15th century Lucca had attained the borders that it was to retain—with only minor adjustments—throughout the remaining centuries of independence. The picture that emerges is of a very weak state, which exercised a very fragile control, particularly in border areas. But the Lucchese state, as in previous centuries, was largely free of rival, autonomous jurisdictions within its borders. And its administrative structures remained highly centralized and intrusive. The chapter compares Lucca, as a somewhat anachronistic relic of the old‐style Italian city‐state, with the new regional powers of 15th‐century Italy. This comparison is complicated by the diverse and fluid characteristics of the new regional formations.

Preservation practices in fifteenth-century Rome afforded a vital means for the Renaissance popes to acquire and extend temporal power over the ancient city. Papal excavation licenses controlled ancient remains with greater precision. Papal involvement in regulating antiquity helped stimulate even greater interest in preservation among the Conservators, the civic magistrates of Rome.

In the fifteenth century, life in Wales was for underdeveloped pre-industrial society. This chapter shows that that the Welsh economy then was an economy perched anxiously near the margin of subsistence, as it was always dependent on the quality of the harvest. Woodlands and fisheries also contributed to the economy. Over a hundred towns of every kind have been identified in medieval Wales. Towndwellers remained closely associated with the agricultural life of the community around them. Towns were also the main centres of crafts and services. Small-scale industrial activities such as cloth and leather goods making were economic contributors. Mining and quarrying, and pottery-making were practiced. Trade reflected the nature of economic production. The goods most in demand were those products by Welsh agriculture. Overland trade was difficult because of the poor conditions of roads and tracks. The fifteenth century and the early decades of the sixteenth century showed major changes in Wales’s economy.

This chapter discusses the prestige and authority of theologians in fifteenth-century Europe when secular princes were beginning to discover religious conformity and orthodoxy as important precondition of unity among their subjects — an age when great urban preachers could determine the form of governments. However, it describes Oxford theologians as less favored by English kings than Cambridge in the century after 1430. The said theologians performed a far less active role than those of Paris in the definition and defense of orthodox teaching. It argues that these are signs of dissatisfaction with the academic study of theology during the fifteenth-century. This chapter also discusses the effect of this dissatisfaction on Oxford theologians. It explains that these fifteenth-century Oxford theologians then maintained, perhaps in a rather narrow and etiolated form, the Scotist tradition.

This chapter discusses issues regarding the challenges to rights and possessions during the fifteenth century and that the most practical remedy was found in ‘lordship’. It explains the university's policy of enlisting the regular championship of a single magnate who could protect its interests. It discusses the effects of politics on the university. During the reign of Henry VII, Oxford's reputation for violent strife had put the university in danger of abolition or exile.

Few medieval pilgrims' guides were written in English; even fewer were illuminated. This chapter examines Oxford, Queen's College, MS 357, a manuscript made in England in the late fifteenth century, which possesses both qualities. The manuscript contains a variety of texts written in Latin and English including pilgrims' guides, prayers to be said at holy sites in Palestine, travellers' tales, and descriptions of miracles that have taken place at shrines. It is also exuberantly illuminated. The miniatures begin with an Annunciation and end with Christ in Judgment. These two images form the parentheses around the others in the manuscript, which depict sites in the Holy Land. The miniatures and decoration unite the disparate texts, turning them into a scale model of salvation history and providing a prompt to virtual pilgrimage.

This chapter presents and examines the implications of the following argument: while the fifteenth-century “age of libraries” took place against the backdrop of expanded literacy in late medieval England, to both their founders and their critics, the new libraries represented an effort to restrict, rather than advance, popular literacy. This argument counters an assumption that the growth of libraries was a natural outcome of, or necessarily promoted, the spread of books and literacy, and it carries implications for understanding the broader cultural significance of libraries. At a time when literacy could no longer be considered the exclusive domain and defining privilege of the clergy, the newly centralized libraries worked to safeguard literacy and its privileges by other means. The chapter makes this point by considering two of the most important libraries of the fifteenth century: the library of Bury St. Edmunds, established by Bishop William Curteys in the middle of the century, and that of Duke Humfrey of Gloucester, who would go on to endow the central university library at Oxford. While the two libraries represent two different forms of literacy—monastic and humanist—they are joined and mediated through the work of John Lydgate, who was a monk at Bury under Curteys and who enjoyed Humfrey's patronage as well as access to his library while composing his monumental work The Fall of Princes.

This chapter is a survey of the multiple ways of organising and experiencing time in the city of Leuven in the fifteenth century. It considers how time was understood in relation to the newly-founded University of Leuven, its social and economic life, including the life of its guilds and markets, its religious institutions and practices, and its visual and sonic cultures, especially the bells of the city. It examines how the language of the old and new was deployed to frame the dramatic transformations in the town’s physical and intellectual life in the fifteenth century. The temporalities of the city were experienced as varied and layered, including complex interactions between the times of the liturgy and other domains of social life.

This chapter introduces a core group of German writers addressing superstition in the fifteenth century and explores the particular contexts in which they wrote. It briefly recounts the commonalities they shared with earlier authorities and how they perpetuated many well-established critiques, before examining new points of emphasis found in their works. These men were not deliberate innovators, yet their increased engagement, at a practical level, with common superstitions required them to focus to a considerable degree on elements of lay religiosity and the murky, troublesome “twilight zone” in which the practical use of prayers, blessings, and appropriated sacramental items might signal either admirable faith or damnable superstition.

During the course of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman sultanate underwent many transformations in the political and cultural sphere. When the century began, Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) was making the first serious if ultimately unsuccessful Ottoman bid at empire. By its end, Mehmed the Conqueror’s much more centralised empire was in the hands of his son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), who commissioned chronicles documenting its entire history down to his own time. These were largely compilations made up of distinct elements, many of which were much older. This chapter focuses on what such texts can tell us about how the fifteenth-century Ottomans perceived the eastern Roman and Islamic past and their own historical role in the region.

This introduction sets the agenda for the volume by arguing for a closer look at fifteenth-century north India, a period of multilingualism, vernacularization, the evolution of script conventions, and the emergence of specialist literary and cultural producers who served new patrons. It charts the changing political landscape of the period, with its new towns and regional polities, showing how the new contenders for power from upwardly mobile martial groups were gradually brought under more settled, bureaucratizing regimes. Against prevailing wisdom, it argues for a continuum between oral and literary cultures, and for recovering histories embedded in texts and images generally dismissed as mythic or religious. It delinks religion from script while drawing attention to the proliferation of religious groups and vocabularies in the period.

David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct diachronic consciousness and a desire to forge something new out of Trevisa's ‘old’ English. This stands in contrast to his more deferential treatment of Chaucer. Matthews thus differentiates between philology as a tool for understanding another language and as an editorial practice focused on rendering texts transparent.