The virtue of place in late medieval Lynn

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic micro-study of the production of place in late medieval Bishop's Lynn and South Lynn in Norfolk. Imaginatively juxtaposing a wide range of cultural artefacts (including visual and sculptural art, literature, documentary texts, architecture, and material culture) it explores how they acted, jointly and severally, as agents within the spatial habitus of Lynn to generate meaning in places that were inscribed with social, religious, economic, and gendered ideologies of power. Place, paradoxically, is always going somewhere, and it is always ideological about how it gets there. The accretive intensification of space through practice, place is more than a site of architectural accumulation: the investment of cultural, social, and political capital marks the narrative acculturation of a site. For the very reason that place maps its informing ideologies in the arc of its trajectory, it spatialises time, looking in all directions. This is true even, and indeed especially, of those places that exist to monumentalise the past: instantiating tradition, they draw out the past, inscribing it in order to colonise it. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to address the way in which place functioned as the engine for the desires of the social and political elite in Lynn, considering how the codes of "virtue" that were imbedded in the function and use of place provided the justification and means for the wider regulation of the social space of the town.

Date of Award	Jul 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Stephen Kelly (Supervisor) & Keith Lilley (Supervisor)