This forum can help us to figure out where we stand, to isolate those current problems, approaches, and objects of study that might fruitfully be seen through the lens of the Everyday. Both the lens and the study will undoubtedly be refined. Cultural Studies may help redefine the object of inquiry so as to make it more visible to investigators of the medieval quotidian. Traditional inquiries into the Everyday are frequently characterized by what I call the 'tyranny of the typical,' which renders both the medieval and modern Everyday ahistorical. The modern consumer is frequently thought to have fled history into the cocoon of private life, where 'nothing happens,' participating vicariously in 'events' created and transmitted by a mass media specializing in the banal.
Human nature is seen as typical, statistical.
Likewise, the medieval Everyday in Braudel's view is pre-historical, matter striving to become history. The challenge for history is to envision an 'eventful Everyday' for the Middle Ages. Chilcoat focuses on a rhetoric of walking that organizes a thirteenth-century French itinerary poem set in Paris. We know a great deal about types of everyday activity, but precious little about practices, which are rich precisely at the intersections, contradictions, and evasions of the typical. In discussing an 'eventful Everyday,' one might also want to consider how the medieval Everyday comes to us on the back of the event.