THESE CONCLUDING REMARKS relate the findings of the different case studies to each other so as to evince some larger patterns, to be tested by future research. The limitations of the case-study approach have been mitigated here by the analysis of contexts more rarely brought together in the same monograph, from the seigneuries of northern France to merchants and humanism in Florence, and from self-narratives in Latin to conduct literature in French. But far more work on agency in medieval society is needed before generalisations can be advanced.

Throughout this volume agency has been a vehicle for the exploration of a set of crucial issues for how people understood and planned their involvement in society. These range from shared representations about social interactions to socioeconomic strategies to individuals’ sense of effectiveness in the world. They belong to the realm of practice and are often left out in studies that focus on social structures, be they systems of beliefs (the Christian view of human affairs as divinely ordained) or political order (‘feudalism’). Ego-documents opened alternative entry points into Western European society c. 1100–1450, from the autobiographical insertions in chronicles to the registers of town notables and middle-rank aristocrats. The pairing of a construct more rarely used in medieval studies with an equally underexplored category of medieval sources has been particularly effective for understanding the individual's experience of the world. The social imaginary reconstructed from private records and vernacular experiments in conduct literature has taken us much closer to the laity's concerns than the doctrinarian writings of church intellectuals. This matters because of what one might call, with slight hyperbole, historians’ battle for the soul of medieval culture: not infrequently the views that obtained within high intellectual circles are presented as ‘the medieval culture’, although only the most salient parts thereof even reached a sizeable audience in the age before print and mass schooling, let alone be accepted by the lay majority with its more down-to-earth priorities. By contrast, the present analysis has spotlighted the lived values and strategic choices defined and recorded by the protagonists themselves in their livres de raison and ricordi. Even the terse evidence of thirteenth-century charters has been used to reconstruct local politics from the perspective of aristocrats concerned with building sociopolitical networks rather than obeying the rules of fief-holding.