Victoria and Silvina Ocampo are two writers of undeniable importance for the Argentine literary tradition. Even more when read through a feminist lens. Recognizing that there’s a lot of critical material written about them, this chapter proposes a different approach. Through the intersection between archive, fiction, and domestic spaces, it addresses the relationship between the sisters, their works, and their day-to-day environment. According to gender studies, houses, family relationships, and friendships (together with the forms of obedience, love, and conflict they imply) offer an opportunity to study the construction of a system of individual, sexual, and generational identities that will influence the Ocampos’ works as well as their ways of intervening in culture, interrupting and deviating traditions and standards, voices, and writings.

Chapter 1 sketches out the nature and scope of the evidence available for Greek housing during the first millennium BCE. Drawing on textual sources (including Demosthenes, Lysias, Xenophon and Plato) the significance of the house in ancient Greek (mainly Classical Athenian) culture is investigated. At the same time the chapter outlines some of the basic structural and decorative features as represented in the archaeological remains of the buildings themselves. Some processes (both human and natural) which shape the material remains of houses are outlined. These include the social context of construction (as far as it can be understood), archaeological formation processes and potential biases introduced during excavation. Emphasis is placed on the need to interpret the archaeology within its own cultural context, setting aside (as far as possible) the urge to draw comparisons with modern, western housing.

In this chapter Adam Hanna notes that “From the lonely farm-redoubts of John Hewitt, to the flooded demesnes imagined by Seamus Heaney to, more recently, the imperiled familial spaces that appear in the work of Sinéad Morrissey, the homes and other refuges of Northern Irish poetry have often been isolated, watchful, and precarious ones.” Apart from the threat of political violence arising from the Troubles (1968–98) in Northern Ireland, Hanna detects a complex dialogic between domestic spaces (which are immediately beholden to local pressures) and the wider environment (which is endangered by rising seas, violent storms, and overflowing rivers). Hanna deconstructs this interplay between the effects of climate change and the “discourses about both the established order of the province and the subversive energies that might undermine this order” and defines a distinctive “Northern Irish ecological poetics” in which “global anxieties and local pressures entwine.”

Built infrastructure, housing, land management etc., are historically conjoined to the legacy of Anglo-Irish big houses. These prominent questions also need to be viewed in relation to ecological imperialism. By 1870, as Kelly Sullivan reminds us in this chapter, there were at least 4,000 big-house estates all over Ireland. In later decades many of these estates fell into disrepair or were razed to the ground by financially strapped owners. In addition, the “violent destruction of close to three hundred big houses during the War of Independence and Civil War (1919–23)” and the repurposing of the remaining houses as “schools, prisons, hospitals, and other institutions [such as] hotels, museums, and tourist sites, or as small privately owned farms,” point to their centrality in Irish geographical, political, and cultural landscapes. However, Kelly argues that although “Big House novels … have undergone a reassessment, with scholars no longer reading them as elegies for an extinct way of life, they are yet to be viewed from an environmental perspective.”

This chapter is about the history, the monuments and the people of Piraeus, the arsenal, and the commercial center of the Athenian empire. The proposed reconstruction of the residential quarters and the harbor installations of this model city designed by Hippodamos, the father of city-planning, is based on recent archaeological research.

This essay surveys the archaeological evidence for houses in the Aegean in the Early Iron Age (tenth to seventh centuries b.c.), considers the significance of changes in the organization of domestic space towards the end of the period, and asks how the surviving houses might relate to the houses and households depicted in the Homeric poems.

The chapter begins with some etymological discussions of the meaning of the words ‘household’, ‘home’ and ‘family’, and concentrates – but not to the exclusion of those social ranks below and above – on the urban bourgeoisie, from among whom Chaucer himself came, and from members of whom his audience was, probably, mostly drawn. It then goes on to consider servants and apprentices, as inevitable accompaniments of this rank, and also looks at the relations between husband and wife, including the roles of wives and widows, and the architecture of urban bourgeois homes. It concludes by looking at those above and below this rank, particularly the nobility, whose ‘great households’ have left considerable evidence of their organisation, but also includes the humbler households, about whom we can say comparatively little, because of the limitations of the evidence.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.