Preface and Postscript Combining a Preface with a Postscript seems a particularly apposite way to introduce (and conclude) a collection of essays on ...

The aim of this article is to review and reconsider what scholars, including historians, archaeologists, and those in other disciplines, are trying to get at when they attempt a “social interpretation” of English late medieval domestic buildings. I focus on the definition and interpretation of “meaning,” and I examine critically a series of concepts routinely deployed in social interpretations in the past, including my own work, such as type, zeitgeist, and intention. I argue that some of these concepts and interpretive (...) moves are problematic and rather than aiding in our understanding, raise further questions in their turn about how buildings were lived in and understood by their medieval inhabitants. I argue for a shift in language and jargon away from “planning” and “meaning” to that of “lived experience”. I explore such a possible shift with reference to different understandings of and debates over the late medieval castle of Bodiam in southeastern England. Such a shift from meaning to lived experience raises fresh challenges for the development and empirical evaluation of interdisciplinary research on medieval buildings, but it also raises fresh possibilities and insights. (shrink)

This article discusses from a specifically German point of view the “spatial turn” in history and the approaches of this forum. Many recent interventions have suggested that “space” was for many years a marginalized category in the German historiographical debate because of the ideological contamination of the category “space” by the Nazis. In the context of the vivid, lively “provincial” or “regional” history practiced in Germany, however, “space” has always played an important role. The debates around the spatial turn nevertheless (...) provide the opportunity for deliberate reconceptualization. This comment proposes a relational understanding of “space” as the core of the new approach and identifies some central elements and terms for it: the differentiation of “spaces,”“places,” and “locations”; movement in space; the division of space in the form of boundaries; finally, the ordering and classification of space in the form of written or visual representations. (shrink)