This chapter demonstrates the need for new and more precise concepts to make sense of early modern households. First, it questions the usefulness of the three-sector model with the argument that many households were active across sectors and their main employment can be hard to identify. Second, with the help of early modern letters, it shows that reliance on several sources of income was not necessarily a sign of vulnerability as it applied to both wealthy and less wealthy households. Third, using work activity data it indicates that the male breadwinner model does not fit with early modern realities. Married women and men were active in most types of work and their authority and responsibilities made them similar to each other and different from the unmarried. Fourth, it argues that it is misleading to conceptualize the household as a closed unit characterized by patriarchal hierarchies. Households had to be open to the surrounding society. Fifth, it demonstrates that, to take advantage of the many links to the outside world, household heads were prepared to delegate and deputize. As a result, economic agency was more dispersed in the population than is usually acknowledged.

The Great Conversation was a broad-based discussion on international issues and world peace that took place beyond the traditional circles of power and of the intellectual elite at the end of the Great War. In a time of global destabilisation and political innovations, it gave ordinary men and women, mainly in Western countries, the opportunity, the desire and the legitimacy to take a stand on international issues by virtue of a new interpretation of their political rights and their own agency. It was an unprecedented, unorganised, yet transnational movement of thought, which questioned the meaning of citizenship in a context of democratisation of political life.

This central chapter turns to written communication to explore its part in regulating and networking theatres and repertoire. It begins with an exploration of the types of information shared between troupes and how discursive networks supported their performances. Although theatres are commonly portrayed as having to compete to survive, this chapter reveals that they also regularly cooperated. By illustrating the equal importance of discursive networks and material exchange among the Großmann (touring), Mainz (ecclesiastical court-affiliated), and Schwerin theatres (secular court-affiliated), it reveals that theatre companies were designed with both court and public audiences in mind, and in practice cultivated a shared repertoire. Programming choices were made to some degree based on location, the status of audiences, tastes of patrons, and access to performance materials. But this chapter argues that such decisions were usually owing to the intense communication of theatrical information and recommendations between theatre directors and enthusiasts – and, ultimately, on the expectations to which a collective imperial culture gave rise.

This chapter explains the significance of Hildegard of Bingen’s letter collection for her public career and for understanding why she wrote letters, why editors collected them, and why readers desired to receive them. It places the letters into the larger context of letter-writing in the twelfth century; like her contemporaries, Hildegard saw letters as the most effective way to publicize her work, but the prophetic style in which she wrote them made them unique and particularly desirable for correspondents. The chapter describes how editors and collaborators gathered her letters into a formal, edited collection that would serve as a record of the widespread and beneficial impact of her prophecy and examines the relationship between Hildegard and her correspondents. The incoming letters reveal that people from all walks of life looked to Hildegard as a source of life-changing spiritual power, while Hildegard’s responses show her wielding that power in a responsible and orthodox manner. The chapter argues that Hildegard’s letter collection offers a unique perspective on the seer, one that brings us closer to the experience of her prophetic career than any other part of her corpus.