Honestly I think the work-leisure dichotomy is kinda bust regardless. Do more years of education mean we have more leisure years than previous generations? Mayb

Honestly I think the work-leisure dichotomy is kinda bust regardless. Do more years of education mean we have more leisure years than previous generations? Maybe the monks' prayer days should count as work. In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves. My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles. >>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties. IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.