ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a sense, through the mining of literary sources, archival material and secondary works, of what the patterns of daily life were in the vast Spanish land during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. It summarizes the variegated contours of lived experiences; moreover, how life was lived and how it ended reflected, to a large extent, social filiation, chronological and geographical contexts, and political, religious and other factors that shaped Spanish society in this period. The chapter begins with eating and dressing as markers of one's location in society. But eating together – holding banquets for festive or mournful occasions – served an important social function. Hilario Casado Alonso describes the banquets organised by small rural communities in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. The same applied to etiquette manners, which by the late fifteenth and throughout the early modern period became the true marker of class.
