The Castle as Social Space
Einleitung:
In the past few decades, castle studies have boomed and ripened into a vibrant interdisciplinary field, embracing approaches from different disciplines and exploring a multitude of issues and themes. It seems rather banal nowadays to state that medieval castles had multiple functions, not only the military and residential, but also the economic, administrative, representational (symbolic) and social, of which none can be seen as the predominant or defi ning one. The paradigmatic shifts the castle studies have witnessed recently are undeniable, even though the traditional ‘military’ understanding of castles is still very resilient and hard to balance against other topics and approaches (cf. Zeune 1996; Zeune 1999; Johnson 2002; Liddiard 2005). The complexity of castles does not end with the question about their function. We have become increasingly aware of the infi nite variety of the physical appearance and layout of castles and of the
complexity of their life histories and architectural development. Any attempt at typology or categorization seems doomed to failure. The more we delve into the world of these intriguing buildings, the more new lines of research open up before us. The social aspects are the chosen theme of this volume. Trying to understand the social microcosm of castles and its spatial dimensions, we are faced with many issues that can be studied from different points of view. The concepts of social space, built environment, identity construction and symbolic representation are particularly relevant and are explored – more or less explicitly – throughout this volume.
Link: https://www.academia.edu/29305029/The_castle_as_social_space_an_introduction