Understanding indoor public space

The approach selected for this article, which in the first instance implies a transition from the conceptualization of closed and immobile spaces to that of open access, processes, movement and practices, also entails a questioning of the porosity of private and public spaces, as well as of outdoor and indoor spaces. The definition of public and private space varies considerably according to the culture and historical period in question. Recent research has shown that public and private were conceptualized and used in a specific manner during the late Middle Ages: private houses, for example, usually had a ‘public dimension’,Footnote ⁸ while the boundaries were at once ‘fluid’ and ‘fragile’.Footnote ⁹ As for religious observances such as devotions and other faith-related practices carried out in a domestic setting that involved reading and knowledge transfer, Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin note that these were ‘often simultaneously personal, familial and communal’.Footnote ¹⁰ Echoing Mary Douglas, they state that ‘the house is a space and a community: it is a repository of memory, a place where each individual is expected to invest in the collective good, somewhere with an aesthetic and moral dimension’.Footnote ¹¹ This characteristic points to one fundamental aspect of domestic devotions: ‘spiritual ties expand outwards from the domestic sphere, enmeshing the whole community in a network of social relationships that had a religious dimension’.Footnote ¹²

During the fifteenth century, in the area that currently encompasses the Netherlands, Flanders and northern France, external factors may have been at play in drawing public activities away from urban streets and squares and into indoor spaces. There is historical evidence documenting an increased occurrence of harsh winters and a cooling of the climate in north-western Europe, most notably perceptible after the 1430s, the so-called Spörer Solar Minimum.Footnote ¹³ The colder winters during this period probably impacted local features in houses and workshops, as well as the architectural approach to institutional buildings throughout north-western Europe, given that more heating was needed, and indoor activities required daylight to penetrate window openings. When travelling through Germany, the Low Countries and France during the years 1517 to 1518, the Italian Antonio de Beatis observed the presence of two- or three-sided bow windows constructed with glass in Germany that facilitated the mutual visibility of both indoor spaces and the street. Proceeding further through the regions situated to the north and to the west of Cologne, de Beatis, moreover, noted the widespread presence of fireplaces in rooms, as well as much larger window openings than in his home area, Puglia in southern Italy.Footnote ¹⁴

These particularities in house construction which the Italian traveller observed can equally be found in surviving architectural remnants from the fifteenth century throughout the Low Countries where fireplaces with chimneys probably had become more commonplace as of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁵ Houses typically had tall and narrow window openings, with leaded glass panes comprising small discs, squares, or lozenges covering the upper parts, while the lower parts were open or covered with a screen.Footnote ¹⁶ Shutters were attached in order to close off the lower parts of the window openings if necessary, either from the inside or the outside. Visual documentation reveals that the wooden shutters on the street level were usually open during daytime and working hours (Figure 1). Many urban houses combined a workplace with a retail shop on the ground floor, situated directly on the street level. Wooden shutters, often foldable, were used to close off these workplaces during non-working hours. During regulated working hours they were opened so that merchandise could be displayed and to ensure enough daylight for artisanal work (Figure 2). Furthermore, de Beatis reported that artisans in Paris could be seen working when he passed by in the street.Footnote ¹⁷ These first-hand observations confirm Jean-Pierre Legay’s findings in guild rules which often prescribed that artisans should engage in their daily work while being visible to the public, with shutters, windows and doors all opened. In due course, the urban and domestic window across north-western Europe was to become a place for sociability and social exchange.Footnote ¹⁸

Figure 1. Master of Alkmaar, Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, 1504 (detail). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, SK-A-2815.

Figure 2. Master of Alkmaar, Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, 1504 (detail). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, SK-A-2815.

The presence of relatively large surfaces of clear translucent glass, in combination with shutters and doors that were usually open during daytime activities, demonstrate that the walls of most urban buildings were ‘porous’ and that ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ were strongly connected, even interpenetrating each other. In addition to these fluid boundaries between the public and private spheres as discussed earlier, the specific material characteristics of urban architecture in the Low Countries and northern France strongly suggest that ‘public spaces’ not only consisted of streets, squares and markets, but that interior spaces of an otherwise industrial, commercial, religious or domestic nature were to a certain extent also treated as public spaces and were perceived as such. Hence, these indoor spaces should be studied as what we would term in this context as ‘indoor public space’.

The workshop of the Amiens-based tanner Nicolas Dupuis serves as an illustrative example of indoor and yet public text-based religious knowledge transfer.Footnote ¹⁹ The objects found in his home and workshop are listed one by one in an inventory compiled shortly after his death in 1517. This document mentions a panel featuring the teachings of Cato (les enseignements Cathon) that was found hanging on one of the walls in his workshop. During the Middle Ages, this text was presented as the work of a Roman philosopher. The text was interpolated with moralizing Christian doctrine and it was widely used as a schoolbook for literacy training and teaching correct moral behaviour.Footnote ²⁰ This panel in Dupuis’ workshop probably reproduced memorable aphorisms of Classical-inspired Christian morality. The panel’s specific location within the workshop is highly suggestive of its intended audience: Dupuis’ own family, his apprentices, co-workers and clients. In light of the fact that his workshop with its open shutters was an indoor public space during the daytime, Cato’s text must equally have been aimed at passers-by in the street, the rue des Tanneurs near the busy river port and the main market square.

Spaces such as Nicolas Dupuis’ workshop were open spaces which could potentially foster the transfer of religious knowledge, but can they truly be considered as public spaces? Jürgen Habermas’ conceptualization of Öffentlichkeit typically links the idea of the ‘public sphere’ to the emergence of the capitalist and bourgeois society of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over recent years, historians of the medieval and early modern periods have questioned Habermas’ generalization of historical processes into a binary ‘before and after’, for example by pinpointing numerous ‘important continuities and overlaps’.Footnote ²¹ In a similar vein, Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerdhoff have crafted a new definition of public spaces (öffentliche Räume) in the late medieval and early modern period:

In the following paragraphs, we will discuss the materiality of late medieval indoor public spaces within an urban context, spaces that were freely accessible to a broad range of city dwellers and visitors, where religious knowledge was stored, discussed, studied and, most importantly, where it was shared and disseminated. A first example of processes of mobility and transfer of religious knowledge can be found in the urban ‘institutional’ houses of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life in Deventer in the Netherlands, as well as in informal, private and yet public spaces in the homes of some Deventer burghers.

Indoor public religious knowledge transfer: religion in the household

The houses of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life in Deventer are one of the most striking manifestations of Modern Devotion, the religious movement that is traditionally connected to Geert Grote and his activities in fourteenth-century Deventer (Figure 3).Footnote ²³ Indeed, the very process of founding and transforming these communities demonstrates a process of transferring private ownership to the organization of religious communities, in which traditional monastic rules were rejected and replaced by internal regulations (drafted initially by Grote himself) in agreement with city councils and with their active involvement. In the case of Deventer city council, this practice was not limited to the earliest stages of founding the communities, for the city councils had to take responsibility for ‘controlling’ such houses and watch over them and their members, their daily activities and their financial management. Firmly in line with the ideals espoused by Modern Devotion, the fulcrum for communities of the Sisters of the Common Life was to lead a life int ghemeyn, i.e. of sharing a common space, pooling financial resources and organizing collective daily activities. Inspired by the earliest Christian communities as described in the Acts of the Apostles, their members were linked by a deep communal yearning to combine not only religious but also daily activities, which were needed to form financially sustainable communities. Community members were not permitted to beg for alms; they were expected to generate and exploit commercial activities and manual labour: weaving and spinning in the case of the Sisters, and the copying and binding of books, as well as educational activities, for the Brothers.Footnote ²⁴ The emphasis placed on work and on the joint administration of incomes, which had to be shared with the entire community, also implied that prospective members were not selected on the basis of their affluence or lack thereof, or for their capacity to contribute to the community’s wealth, or their possession of moveable and immoveable goods.Footnote ²⁵ Compared with ‘traditional’ religious communities, the communities of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life were thus open to broader strata of the urban populace. By virtue of their active stance and their pursuit of commercial activities, they were strongly involved in the social fabric of urban life.Footnote ²⁶ Thanks to such familial, personal and commercial relations, their houses could equally fulfil the function of public indoor spaces for disseminating religious knowledge and texts.

Figure 3. Jacob van Deventer, map of Deventer (detail), 1545. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Res/200. Highlighted: formal and informal meeting houses of the Modern Devout.

The strong ties between these communities and their urban environment, which constitute the basis for the transmission of religious knowledge localized in the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, are evident when one considers how these institutions were founded. Individual citizens took the initiative, bequeathing their own houses or dwellings to a new-born community, or assumed the responsibility of opening up their homes to men or women willing to share a life of work and prayer, thus creating new religious ‘sites of knowledge’.Footnote ²⁷

From the very outset of Modern Devotion, this process assumed a pattern: Geert Grote, for instance, donated his parents’ house (1374) ‘to behoef der arme luden die Gode dyenen willen nu ende hierna’ (for the need of poor people wishing to serve God now and in the future).Footnote ²⁸ This community of unmarried women and widows – known as the Meester Geerthuis – was under the jurisdiction of the city council, and was initially without any specific religious character and not affiliated to any religious order. Two Deventer aldermen acted as provisores and were also responsible for confirming the selection of the maters, the communities’ female leaders. Such an initiative needs to be situated in the long tradition of the foundation of houses for less affluent urban dwellers, as exemplified by the Stappenhuis funded by Henricus Stappe, vicarius of the Lebuinus Church in 1342 which offered refuge to 16 poverty-stricken unmarried women, as well as to poor travellers to Deventer. Coincidentally, the newly founded Meester Geertshuis was located close to the older Stappenhuis, thus creating a religious cluster within Deventer’s city walls. Geert Grote’s example was followed by his fellow Deventer burghers and neighbours, Johannes Kersteken and Gerrit Brandes, who owned houses next to each other and close to the Meester Geerthuis and the Stappenhuis. This spatial concentration of houses of the Sisters of the Common Life within the city walls but in a less urbanized part of Deventer which was therefore available for establishing new communities is of particular interest: it draws attention to the closely knit spatial aspect of late medieval religious movements and their establishment within the urban fabric, thus allowing for the transformation from lay to religious and sacred space and for creating networks for the exchange of religious material. Such close proximity could also have contributed to the ‘visibility’ of the communities’ houses which, although religious in essence, were still identified by the name of their lay founders and to some extent maintained their original domestic features and links with the urban community. Two other houses of the Sisters of the Common Life point to a slightly different practice in terms of their foundation. In both the Lamme van Diesehuis and the Buiskenshuis, women played a pivotal role in creating a community. The widow Lamme van Dies assembled women in her home and transformed her domestic space into a religious community. Subsequently, the number of participating women grew, and the community came to occupy two neighbouring premises (1388–90). The Buiskenshuis was established at the request of Reinier Buiskens, who donated his house to one of the Sisters affiliated with the Meester Geertshuis on condition that she would establish a religious house, and that his own daughter, Alijt, would also be granted access to the community.Footnote ²⁹ This house was created in order that women could live together and earn their subsistence by dint of their sewing, weaving and spinning activities, and also to care for boarders, mostly elderly women. These details illustrate certain salient aspects of the houses of the Sisters of the Common Life in Deventer, notably their close links with their urban environment, both from a spatial and a social standpoint. They played a key role in the religious connectivity which characterized late medieval cities.Footnote ³⁰ The connection between the ‘houses’ and the urban population continued, moreover, also after the first phase of the communities, through donations in kind and practical help in the refurbishment of the premises. A case in point is the donation of linen and towels by the Deventer widow Alijt Hillebrandes to the Sisters of the Brandeshuis, registered after Alijt’s death in 1455.Footnote ³¹

The public character of these communities, which has not been afforded sufficient attention in traditional historical research, becomes visible on account of the strong ties with the civic government and its aldermen, from the combination of religious and charitable activities and from the organization of religious activities for and with the lay population. Moreover, the Sisters were sharing official sacred spaces with their fellow city dwellers, at least until the end of the fifteenth century.Footnote ³² At once visible and recognizable, the Sisters were living proof of the religious transformation Modern Devotion had brought about. Practices such as preaching and organizing monthly colloquies for the urban populace came to characterize the houses of the Brothers of the Common Life and will be discussed in greater detail below. The female communities, for their part, engaged in public works in addition to their participation in daily and commercial activities, through their involvement in the transmission of textual knowledge: ultimately, these houses were to become repositories of religious knowledge at the disposal of local communities, which, in turn, participated in these communities’ religious dynamism.

The core idea of ‘sharing’ and ‘communing with others’ as a voluntary choice, which animated the new communities and constituted the backbone of their organization, also becomes apparent through the exchange of books between religious communities and lay people. Recent research on manuscripts and early printed texts has demonstrated that those communities influenced by Modern Devotion fervently participated in exchanges of textual materials: whenever laypeople donated manuscripts or incunables to the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, they were effectively willing to renege on private ownership and share with a larger community, thus contributing to a process of public religious education.Footnote ³³ The library attached to the Heer-Florenshuis, one of the earliest communities of the Brothers of the Common Life in Deventer, housed a number of manuscripts and incunables donated by Deventer citizens, whose donation was registered in the colophons.Footnote ³⁴ In some cases, the books donated to these communities were actually used in enacting forms of public literacy. Katharina van Arkel, one of the Sisters at the Meester Geertshuis, for example, would read from her books with those people she was interacting with during business transactions on behalf of the convent or while she was staying at taverns during her travels.Footnote ³⁵ Books formed a continuum, interlinking lay and religious domains, public and private spheres and indoor and outdoor spaces.Footnote ³⁶

Furthermore, the houses of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life established a vital connection between domestic and religious space: the Sisters became sources of inspiration for other women, who were willing to transform their own private space into an open space so as to perform religious practices. Although research on these informal communities is still lacking, an examination of the last wishes of Katharina Kerstkens, an affluent late fifteenth-century Deventer widow, reveals that establishing small religious communities in domestic space was commonplace.Footnote ³⁷ Kerstkens laid down that after her death she wished that one of her houses ‘bewoent worden met .iiij. (4) of .v. (5) personen diet om gods wille begeren’, should be used by four or five people willing to fulfil God’s wish, i.e. who were willing to pursue a religious life. Kerstkens herself might have been living in a house together with three ‘spiritual sisters’, probably kindred spirits participating in her daily and religious activities.Footnote ³⁸

Kerstkens and her spiritual sisters were probably performing their devotional activities, making use of those objects that have been reconstructed through a scrutiny of Deventer household inventories. Deventer citizens routinely possessed holy water stoups, sacred paintings, printed religious images, paternosters, Agnus Dei and small foldable chairs which they used during sermons.Footnote ³⁹ Each of these religious objects serves as a reminder of just how domesticity and religiosity had consolidated, a process which was propagated by late medieval treatises for the laity. The fifteenth-century treatise in the Middle Dutch vernacular, De Spieghel ofte reghel der kerstenghelove, a mirror for lay believers, specifies, for example, that both family and other household members should attend mass every feast day and go to communion at least four times a year. While in church they were asked to listen to the word of God and discuss it together at home in the evenings. They were also requested to read every evening a chapter from a religious book and the Seven Hours of our Lady, either in Latin or in Middle Dutch.Footnote ⁴⁰ This reference to their communal discussions on passages from the Gospels is particularly relevant as it underscores how domestic space had been transformed into sacred space.

Such use of domestic space was not restricted to members of the household; people from outside could also participate in certain forms of religious services and devotional reading activities. A typical example is an anonymous Bruges lady, who happened to be the recipient of a set of letters and a religious treatise written by a Franciscan c. 1480 and now kept in Leuven, Maurits Sabbebibliotheek.Footnote ⁴¹ In one of these letters, the Franciscan refers to activities taking place at her Bruges residence: he describes how he had been organizing religious meetings in her domestic space with a group of people willing to discuss with him topics such as temptation, venial and mortal sins. Given that she had to leave on other business during one of these meetings, he noted down the focal points of their discussions and shared with her the highlights of the programme of religious education which was taking place in her house. Two points need to be stressed in this unique first-hand description of religious domestic life in the late medieval Netherlands: the fact that the lady was hosting religious meetings in her house and, perhaps most importantly, that her own domestic space was open to those who were participating in communal religious instruction activities.

This lady’s religious education programme is, moreover, as Pieter Boonstra states, even more articulated. The spiritual guidance offered by the anonymous friar entails both conversations and exchange of texts. In addition to the series of letters, the manuscript contains several sermons, four of which seem to be reportationes drawn up by the friar minor after listening to the sermons himself – a rather unique example of Middle Dutch sermons preached in public being recorded by a member of the congregation and successively transformed in reading texts for lay users.Footnote ⁴² As in the case of the programme of religious education performed in a domestic space, the transposition of sermons into reading texts for use in a personal or collective use in an indoor space testifies to the transformation of domestic spaces into sites of religious education.

In taberna: urban taverns and inns as indoor public spaces of religious knowledge transfer

Like the drinking song In taberna quando sumus, part of the Carmina Burana, medieval sources often depict venues such as inns, taverns and wine houses as sinful places of debauchery, leading inevitably to alcohol abuse, drunkenness, prostitution and gambling.Footnote ⁴³ Despite such negative connotations, Beat Kümin has demonstrated convincingly the existence of a religious aspect to taverns and inns during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘some public houses acquired “sacral” attributes of their own’, such as the presence of a chapel, the preaching of sermons, and in other cases it was the religious institutions that received visitors and served alcoholic beverages’.Footnote ⁴⁴ There are, however, medieval antecedents that predate the religious connotations of post-Reformation taverns studied by Kümin, and these will be analysed in this section as examples of late medieval indoor public spaces where the material context (such as architecture, objects and books) in combination with specific embodied events of sociability gave rise to religious activities, for example a free and open exchange of religious knowledge.

Kümin also demonstrated that during the post-Reformation period taverns and inns were open and accessible public spaces that could function as sites of information exchange and ‘newsrooms’ of early modern society.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was, however, not a new development, but rather a centuries-old practice of taverns and inns functioning as information hotspots for local people and connecting them to the wider world.Footnote ⁴⁶ Visitors came from near and far and included foreign travellers such as merchants, political and ecclesiastic officials and pilgrims.Footnote ⁴⁷ Local people frequented these venues too, for wedding feasts, as well as for collective wine drinking events and banquets organized by members of local guilds, confraternities and other associations.

These venues had a clearly public character, due not least to their open material structure, as can be inferred from contemporary paintings (Figure 4), which show the open door of the inn or tavern, connecting the indoor space to the street’s outdoor spaces. The way in which taverns were built to connect indoor space to life on the streets, making indoor events visible, audible and accessible to passers-by, combined with the intensive exchanges of commercial, political and religious information which took place inside them, makes a powerful argument for considering them as indoor public spaces. Throughout the following analysis, we will focus on the materiality of late medieval urban taverns and inns as indoor public spaces of sociability with strong religious connotations where exchanges of religious knowledge took place. These historical processes can be traced through the materiality of the architectural environment and of the objects present, especially when reinforced by the spiritual connotations provided by textual cultures and fraternal practices of embodied sociability and charitable actions.

Figure 4. Master of the Catholic Kings (probably a Flemish master active in Spain), Marriage at Cana, 1495/97. Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1952.5.42. (www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41655.html).

Late medieval sociability in voluntary associations such as guilds, confraternities and chambers of rhetoric,Footnote ⁴⁸ as well as gatherings in freely accessible indoor spaces such as taverns, inns and wine houses,Footnote ⁴⁹ often fostered group discussions and the exchange of information covering a broad range of issues, from business advice to religious topics. For example, a unique medieval membership list of the merchants’ confraternity (fraternitatem dictam Coepmannerghilde) is preserved in Deventer.Footnote ⁵⁰ Its membership included not only wealthy merchants from the urban upper classes, aldermen, magistrates, knights, clerics (such as monks, priests and canons), but surprisingly also artisans and middle-class burghers, such as shoemakers, bakers, tailors, fish mongers, stone masons and even a few farmers.Footnote ⁵¹ While the Deventer confraternity’s rules are concise, they do nevertheless show that the organization was based on the Christian ideals of fraternity and charity as espoused by the Gospels: members promised each other assistance at markets in faraway places and in case of income loss.Footnote ⁵² New members (typically sons of sitting members, including illegitimate sons) were initiated at a collective drinking event of the brethren (fratribus congregatis et eorum ghilde bibentibus) that took place each year around the first day of February.Footnote ⁵³ This would have taken place most plausibly at a public venue with sufficient seating space and serving wine, such as an inn or tavern. On these occasions, members would sit together rubbing shoulders, sharing wine and food. Given that the confraternity included clerics and lay people alike, it is likely that not only business information was exchanged, but also religious guidance was offered, and that the brethren also discussed religious topics.

Religious knowledge was also communicated and shared through embodied religious practice. For example, the annual banquet and collective wine drinking organized by the Deventer Coepmannerghilde, as well as by most other medieval confraternities, guilds and associations, also implied a confirmation of the mutual bond linking individual members, as depicted for example in the painting Banquet of the Crossbow Confraternity St Joris in Amsterdam from 1533 (Figure 5). Banquets such as these represented a vital expression of the spirit of convivium, as well as an embodiment of values espoused by the Gospels such as charity, fraternity and love.Footnote ⁵⁴ As David Garrioch observes, these collective events also strongly resembled Christ’s Last Supper and its re-enactment during the liturgy of the Eucharist: ‘Traditionally, too, confraternal sociability extended the spiritual communion of the Eucharist into feasting and drinking on the major feast days or sometimes following the admission of new members.’Footnote ⁵⁵

Figure 5. Cornelis Anthonisz, Banquet of the Crossbow Confraternity St Joris, in Amsterdam, 1533. Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, SA 7279. (http://hdl.handle.net/11259/collection.38424). With two costly wine glasses for ceremonial drinking displayed on the table.

In addition to partaking in the Eucharist, the medieval tradition of communal drinking ‘church wine’ or ‘church ale’ in parish churches was a social and religious event that bore a deep resemblance to the confraternities’ wine drinking gatherings in taverns. Most confraternity members would have been familiar with how wine or ale, sometimes accompanied by bread, was shared by parishioners in their parish churches after mass on important Christian feasts. Medieval administrative sources regularly feature charitable donations by laypeople of wine, chalices and bread to their parishes destined for such events. A very early example dating from the year 1288, among many others that could be quoted here, is the donation of five sous tournois by Nicholes Vilains au Poc, husband of Marien and living in Tournai/Doornik, for wine to be distributed among parishioners of Our Lady’s parish at Easter, Whitsun and Christmas.Footnote ⁵⁶ Examples such as these testify to the fact that collective wine drinking as a parallel to the Eucharist was a deeply engrained tradition and a widely shared practice.

The examples discussed here also show that collective wine drinking and banqueting in the potentially sinful environment of a tavern or an inn could acquire a powerful spiritual meaning. Participation in these events also resulted in the dissemination of religious knowledge amongst members, for example, by means of the embodied enactment of fraternal love and charity, or by means of a recollection of the marriage at Cana, the Last Supper and the Eucharist.Footnote ⁵⁷ Conversely, paintings depicting these episodes from the Gospels sometimes situate them in late medieval taverns or inns, as was the case with a late fifteenth-century panel by a Flemish–Castilian artist representing the marriage at Cana, which once again underlines the potential sacral and religious connotations of these spaces (Figure 4).

Material objects present in taverns and inns could also contribute to strengthening the religious connotations of these spaces. An illustrative example is the inventory of the objects present in the house with the sign board of the Plat d’étain (Tin Plate) in Amiens, compiled in August 1518 after the death of the owner, Jean Matissard.Footnote ⁵⁸ The inventory refers to Matissard as a merchant, but his house was certainly a tavern, as attested to by the sign board’s allusion, the large number of tables and seats mentioned in the inventory and the presence of a cabaret: a wooden construction where typically food and drink were served.Footnote ⁵⁹

In 1482, Matissard was elected maître of a local confraternity called le Puy Notre-Dame, whose members composed religious poetry, performed theatre plays and attended the church services for other members’ marriages and funerals.Footnote ⁶⁰ The annual election of a new maître for the Puy Notre-Dame was invariably accompanied by a banquet and a competition for the best poem celebrating the Virgin, using a predetermined refrain of a metaphoric nature. Just as with the Deventer confraternity, the surviving list of maîtres reveals that membership of the Puy Notre-Dame of Amiens included clerics (the bishop, canons, priests, monks, the schoolmaster of the Latin school) and urban lay people from a wide variety of backgrounds, ranging from local noblemen to artisans as a silver smith, a pastry baker and a purse maker.Footnote ⁶¹

Matissard’s involvement with the confraternity’s literary activities is also vouched for by the presence in his house of a small panel painting of the Virgin together with its accompanying poem.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, it can be surmised that the annual banquet and other festive gatherings of the maîtres and maîtresses of the Puy Notre-Dame occasionally took place in his tavern. Just as with the Deventer Coepmannerghilde, the banquets organized by the Amiens confraternity were acts of Christian charity and reminiscent of the Last Supper. Yet, it should be noted that the membership’s specific focus on composing and reciting religious poetry indicates that the transfer of religious knowledge was at the heart of their activities. Most notably, the annual competitions’ winning poems testify to the fact that biblical and theological knowledge, sometimes of a quite complicated nature, was disseminated in vernacular (Picard-)French.Footnote ⁶³

Furthermore, the Plat d’étain’s inventory reveals that some of its public rooms were filled with paintings depicting religious iconography and with books containing biblical and sacred texts. The above-mentioned painting of the Virgin with a poem was surrounded by several other objects featuring religious iconography in the same room on the ground level to which the guests most likely would have had access: a painting of Saint Veronica, an image of Our Lady of Pity, a crucifix, Saint Jacob with a gilded Virgin and a painting of Our Lady. Furthermore, Matissard kept three copies of the Book of Hours in that room, strongly suggesting that he read his prayers surrounded by these paintings. Another collection of books, most of them religious texts such as the Passion of Christ in French, was stored in a wooden box in an upstairs room.

Even more significant from the perspective of indoor public space and the public transfer of religious knowledge are some objects present in a downstairs room opening to the street. This was one of the public seating areas of the tavern, open to the street with its windows and shutters – and consequently visible to passers-by. In this public indoor space, a printed bible in a red leather binding was present, as well as a gilded image of the Virgin. This material context and the Plat d’étain’s sacral attributes – religious images, prayer books, bibles and other religious texts – are a clear indication of this space’s potential religious connotations, while the books and images were also instrumental in sharing religious knowledge and practices.

The presence of religious books and religious iconography can also be attested to in other inns and taverns in Amiens, including an inn named the House of the Rose and a wine house with cellars named le Mouton noir (the Black Sheep), both situated in Amiens on the busy square in front of the cathedral.Footnote ⁶⁴ Sacral attributes of taverns and inns can also be found elsewhere throughout the Low Countries: for example, the Wilde Man inn at Leuven where an altarpiece adorned the dining room and where most bedrooms featured an altarpiece or a painting depicting religious subjects such as the Annunciation or the Man of Sorrows.Footnote ⁶⁵ Travellers must have also carried religious books in their luggage. Documentation of this kind is very scarce, but a well-documented example is the case of Jamet Biguet, a merchant from the hamlet Sévérac near Nantes who is reported to have had a printed Latin Breviary with him while on a business trip to Tours in 1498.Footnote ⁶⁶

In some instances, we encounter the reverse situation: abbeys, convents and other religious houses running taverns and serving wine. The aldermen from Amiens regularly expressed exasperation on account of the fact that Dominicans and Augustinians were operating public venues within their urban convents, because being religious orders, they were exempt from having to pay taxes to the city council. In 1458, for example, the aldermen complained that the Dominicans were selling wine publicly at a tavern situated within their convent and that they were behaving as lay people and merchants, while neglecting their vows of obedience, chastity and poverty:

While those taverns and wine houses run by religious orders might have been organized in such a way so as to avoid taxation, the Dominican and Augustinian friars in Amiens could also have been exploiting ‘the pastoral potential of public houses’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Members of both orders were actively preaching to the public in Amiens and reports from the aldermen’s meetings contain references to crowds of people walking to the Augustinian convent just east of the cathedral on a daily basis in order to partake in devotions.Footnote ⁶⁹

Conclusion: connecting threads

It becomes evident from the examination of Deventer and Amiens houses and taverns that preaching activities function perfectly as a connecting thread in our discussion and afford us the opportunity to review further evidence of how indoor spaces were used for public activities related to the transmission of religious knowledge and the correlation between domestic, religious and public space that has been explored in this article.

The small wooden stools used during sermons, which were privileged occasions and spaces for religious knowledge transfer, exemplify this correlation. As mentioned in the third section, Deventer household inventories refer to the presence of prekestoelen, small portable chairs, which churchgoers used when attending sermons or other public addresses of a religious nature.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similar portable stools used ‘for going to the sermon’ can be regularly found in the possession of lay people in the Amiens estate inventories as well. The tanner Nicolas Dupuis from Amiens, mentioned in the introduction, for example, had two caielles a aller au sermon in his workshop. These portable stools came in a variety of shapes: some of them were foldable, while iconographical sources also depict a tripod with a backrest, as in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s panoramic painting The Fight between Carnival and Lent (Figure 6), in which some individuals in a crowd of people veiled in a so-called huik Footnote ⁷¹ can be seen exiting the church carrying these stools. The collection of the Rijksmuseum Twente in the Netherlands features a similar original fifteenth-century stool (Figure 7).

Figure 6. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight between Carnival and Lent (detail), 1559. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, 1016. ©KHM-Museumsverband. (www.khm.at/de/object/320722549d/).

Figure 7. Small portable chair used for attending sermons (driepootstael), fifteenth century. Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twente, Inv. nr. 0259.

These material objects link indoor and outdoor activities and clearly testify to how domestic and public religious spaces had converged. Furthermore, they constitute material evidence of one of the core activities organized by the Brothers of the Common Life in Deventer: the practice of the collatio. As the house regulations lay out, the Brothers were requested to organize ‘mutual collations’ in their own House during which passages from Scripture would be read aloud and later discussed as part of a process of communal education and edification. The Brothers were also urged to open up these discussions to ‘schoolboys and other men of goodwill who come…for instruction, so that [they] may get to know them [the Brothers] better and prove more diligent towards those who seem to be of good hope’.Footnote ⁷² These same schoolboys and ‘good men of good will’ were invited on feast days after vespers to ‘come to the…house for spiritual instruction’. During this collation, passages from Scripture in Dutch, dealing with a broad range of theological issues such as ‘vices, the virtues, contempt for the world, fear of God’, were read aloud for the listening public. After this public reading, ‘each [of the Brothers] strives to speak with several of them, addressing them on the same subject in edifying words’. This educational process could also be completed by a face to face meeting in one of the Brothers’ rooms. It was particularly important ‘not to keep them long, certainly no longer than a half hour’ and not to ‘make conversation about the nonsense and rumours circulating in the world but rather on matters necessary for the salvation of souls. [They] should instruct them with urgency, exhorting them in particular to become open about disclosing their temptations and passions as well as ready and willing to acquiesce in good counsel.’Footnote ⁷³ As Pieter Boonstra has recently indicated, these instructions were put into practice in Deventer and in other cities in which communities of Modern Devout had been founded; the Brethrens’ houses were thus to function as hubs for the exchange of religious knowledge.

Just as in Deventer, late medieval Amiens boasted of a considerable number of convents run by mendicant and preaching orders, all active in disseminating religious knowledge among the laity, by means of public reading from books and through sermons. Reports of the aldermen’s discussions contain several references to the Augustinians, as mentioned above, notably concerning the large number of people frequenting their convent, as well as the friars’ request for a donation that would enable them to build a more spacious meeting hall that could accommodate the crowds that came to listen to their sermons and to perform devotional exercises.Footnote ⁷⁴

The examples of indoor public spaces in Deventer and Amiens, together with material objects discussed in this article, demonstrate the importance of approaching religious knowledge in terms of exchange, connectivity, porosity and mobility. The houses of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life were simultaneously religious and domestic spaces, at once open and visible to and for the lay world, and accessible in order to create and exchange religious contents. Though governed by rules and a series of formalized practices, these houses did not differ in essence from domestic spaces, which could, in turn, develop into sites of knowledge for and beyond immediate family members. Inns, taverns and wine houses were publicly accessible venues where alcohol was consumed, and yet they were material spaces for religious practice and observance, as testified to by the widespread presence of sacral objects such as books with biblical references and devotional texts, altarpieces and paintings with religious themes. The presence of all these objects was neither without significance nor accidental, or even a cover-up for sinful activities. Rather, they were instruments in the sharing of religious knowledge and enablers of its wider dissemination. Furthermore, these inns and taverns were also social spaces for religion: they functioned as public meeting points for clergy and laity alike, most notably but not uniquely for the confraternity meetings which entailed the communal sharing of food and wine. Such exchanges between clergy and laity undoubtedly resulted in discussions of religious topics and thus contributed to the emergence of a late medieval public sphere.

The importance of these indoor public spaces for the reconstruction of religious knowledge in late medieval Europe cannot be underestimated. This approach opens up new avenues for research and allows a better understanding of social and cultural transformations, challenging traditional patterns of separation between private and public, indoor and outdoor and lay and religious.