The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life brings together the latest research on peasantry in medieval Europe. The aim is to place peasants - as small-scale agricultural producers - firmly at the centre of this volume, as people with agency, immense skill and resilience to shape their environments, cultures and societies. This volume examines the changes and evolutions within village societies across the medieval period, over a broad chronology and across a wide geography. Rural structures, families and hierarchies are examined alongside tool use and trade, as well as the impact of external factors such as famine and the Black Death. The contributions offer insights into multidisciplinary research, incorporating archaeological as well as landscape studies alongside traditional historical documentary approaches across widely differing local and regional contexts across medieval Europe. This book will be an essential reference for scholars and students of medieval history, as well those interested in rural, cultural and social history.

This book explores the experience of childhood and adolescence in later medieval English rural society from 1250 to 1450. Hit by major catastrophes - the Great Famine and then a few decades later the Black Death - this book examines how rural society coped with children left orphaned, and land inherited by children and adolescents considered too young to run their holdings. Using manorial court rolls, accounts and other documents, Miriam Muller looks at the guardians who looked after the children, and the chattels and lands the children brought with them. This book considers not just rural concepts of childhood, and the training and schooling young peasants received, but also the nature of supportive kinship networks, family structures and the roles of lordship, to offer insights into the experience of childhood and adolescence in medieval villages more broadly.

The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions, beliefs, and influencing factors that may lead to different fertility outcomes among young women in Nicaragua, a country with one of the highest adolescent fertility rates in Latin America. The results are based on qualitative data collected in urban areas. Miriam Muller reveals that two structural constraints affect women's choices and their capacity to actively participate in defining their life paths: poverty and traditional gender norms.This book contributes to the discussion of intergenerational transmission of poverty by disentangling the mechanisms behind decision-making around teenage motherhood and by describing the consequences of these decisions.

Radical ideologies may manifest differently at first, but they do follow a similar logic: truth claims, promises of salvation and a unifying common enemy. In Yemen's transition process today, the secessionist movement Al-Hirak has summoned the spirit of South Yemen, the only Marxist state in Arabia. This book meticulously describes how East Germany supported the implantation of this alien ideology in Yemen through its policy of "Socialist state- and nation-building". In the same breath, the analysis captures the GDR's activities in the Middle East and their vital role in Moscow's Cold War strategy. Last but least, the study provides one of the few compact overviews of East German foreign policy in the English language of today.