Subtheme:
Care and Control in Urban Communities

Especially in times of crisis, medieval cities struggled to both care for and control their  inhabitants. Decisions about whom to support or regulate–and how–shaped the lives of city  residents and could divide or link discrete communities within the city. Moreover, as they are  today, cities in the Middle Ages were often loci of conflict over questions about who deserves  care, what forms of social control are necessary, and how resistance should be exercised. This  sub-theme therefore welcomes papers and panels considering how care and control were  exercised in medieval urban communities, from any disciplinary and methodological  perspectives and on all periods and places within the Global Middle Ages.  

Which groups were deemed vulnerable, and thus in need of care, and which potentially  disruptive, and thus in need of control? Did answers to these questions change during periods of  crisis (e.g. increased efforts to control religious and/or ethnic minorities)? What caused  communities to perceive a crisis—for instance, could changing constructions of disability or  criminality lead to increased efforts at control? This sub-theme brings the topic of refuge and  resistance into focus through examinations of populations likely to be the targets of both  sympathy and suspicion, e.g. refugees, the unhoused, servants, the enslaved, and hospital  residents. Those only temporarily present in cities – such as pilgrims – could be considered  alongside conceptually and spatially liminal groups such as flagellants, Hussites, Waldensians,  and beguines. Analyses of urban communities at any level are welcome, including the parish, the  neighborhood, and the household.  

We also welcome examinations of who exercised agency in designing systems of care and  control, and how they attempted to enact their agendas. Care and control could be exercised by  individuals, institutions (e.g. universities, hospitals, mosques, synagogues, and courts), and  collectives (e.g. city councils; legal and medical professionals; and inquisitors). This could thus  include considerations of attempts to enforce or resist the application of regulation, both local,  such as civic statutes, and supralocal, such as papal decrees. It could also include analyses of  how ideas about care and control were communicated, for instance, through the genres of oath  books and statutes or through the delivery of sermons. 

Medieval cities were distinctively shaped by the (attempted) control of urban spaces and  resources. Potential questions include: who had access to the city itself, to urban facilities, to  legal privileges, to economic opportunities? Who could use urban spaces, when, and how? What  sights, sounds, and smells were regulated? How were urban spaces used to articulate, impose,  and contest individual and group identity, and to promote or discourage interactions between  groups, e.g. through theatre, debate and disputation, and liturgical performance?  
Finally, we welcome papers and panels comparing the medieval and the contemporary. In  particular, we invite analyses of modern (mis)understandings of medieval systems of care and  control, and considerations of how popular ideas about ‘the medieval’ – from assumptions about  torture to fantasies of communal care – are used to justify and/or resist current systems of social,  economic, and political control.