An indispensible tool for students of Taylor, Puritan writing, and early New England culture, Hammond's book also offers valuable insights to all Americanists interested in how their field developed.
Edward Taylor: Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism is an indispensable tool for students of Taylor, Puritan writing, and early New England culture. It also offers valuable insights to all Americanists interested in howtheir field developed, and to anyone concerned with literary theory and its impact on the writing of literary history.
William Page
A History of the County of Suffolk
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Sylvia Federico
The Classicist Writings of Thomas Walsingham
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A comparative reading of the "literary" works of Thomas Walsingham, highlighting his reaction to contemporary historical events.
The literary career of Thomas Walsingham, a significant figure in late fourteenth-century classicist letters in England and an overlooked contemporary of Chaucer, has been neglected - which this book remedies. Following the texts,rather than individuals or institutions, it demonstrates both authors' participation in a previously unrecognized discursive field that spans Latinate clerical prose and secular vernacular poetry, opening for reexamination the "idea" of public literature in the late Middle Ages and recalibrating the terms of the conversation about the advent of humanistic textual practice in England. Providing a connected and comparative reading of Walsingham's works, alongside those of Chaucer, and taking both historical and literary approaches, the book extends our understanding of Chaucer through the exploration of his relationship to the clerical constituencies of London, Oxford, and monasteries in the South-East, and inserts Walsingham into the modern study of the reception of the Latin classics among the vernacular authors of his period.
Sylvia Federico is Professor of English and member of the Classical and Medieval Studies Program at Bates College.
P J P Goldberg
Youth in the Middle Ages
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Evidence for childhood and youth from the sixth century to the sixteenth, but with particular emphasis on later medieval England.
Moving on from the legacy of Ariès, these essays address evidence for childhood and youth from the sixth century to the sixteenth, but with particular emphasis on later medieval England. The contents include the idea of childhoodin the writing of Gregory of Tours, skaldic verse narratives and their implications for the understanding of kingship, Jewish communities of Northern Europe for whom children represented the continuity of a persecuted faith, children in the records of the northern Italian Humiliati, the meaning of romance narratives centred around the departure of the hero or heroine from the natal hearth, the age at which later medieval English youngsters left home, how far they travelled and where they went, literary sources revealing the politicisation of the idea of the child, and the response of young, affluent females to homiletic literature and the iconography of the virgin martyrs in the later middle ages.
Contributors: FRANCES E. ANDREWS, HELEN COOPER, P.J.P.GOLDBERG, SIMCHA GOLDIN, EDWARD F. JAMES, JUDITH JESCH, KIM M. PHILLIPS, MIKE TYLER, ROSALYNN VOADEN.
Richard Olney
Farming and Society in North Lincolnshire
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Engaging account of the fortunes of a farming family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Proputty, proputty, proputty: Tennyson's "Northern Farmer, New Style" could hear the word in the rhythm of his horse's hooves as he cantered between his fields. The Dixon family built up their estate in Holton-le-Moor, betweenMarket Rasen and Caistor, from a minor purchase in 1741 to the point where they owned the whole parish, with a fine house, a governess for their daughters, and a phaeton in which to ride out. But despite these marks of status, they remained working farmers well into the Victorian era. Even more remarkably, they created and preserved a comprehensive archive, including farming accounts, diaries and correspondence. Dr Richard Olney has known this archive for nearly fifty years, first uncovering the documentary riches at Holton Hall (where manuscripts from the loft had to be lowered in baskets to the study below) and subsequently cataloguing the entire collection in the LincolnshireArchives. In this book he creates a vivid portrait of the building up of a farming estate over several generations, revealing the introduction of agricultural improvements, the use of canals and, later, railways to access wider markets, and the place of "the middling sort" in nineteenth-century English rural society.
Richard Olney was an archivist at the Lincolnshire Archives Office from 1969 to 1975, and an Assistant Keeper with the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1976 to 2003. His publications include Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885 (Oxford 1973) and Rural Society and County Government in Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire (History of Lincolnshire Committee 1979).
Patricia E.C. Croot
A History of the County of Middlesex
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Like so much of Middlesex, Chelsea was swallowed up by Greater London. Here its history restores its lost identity.
Chelsea was a desirable riverside residence for wealthy merchants, lawyers, and courtiers from the fifteenth century, and a pleasure resort for all ranks of society from the eighteenth; it is now one of the most expensive and desirable places to live in London. This new volume relates all this and more, including a re-examination of the location of Sir Thomas More's house, a reassessment of Henry VIII's relationship with the manor house, the history of a major estate not previously identified, and a survey of the farm-gardening which gave prosperity to some local inhabitants. Facets of Chelsea's more recent history covered include the rebuilding of eastern Chelsea, which removed alarge lower middle- and working-class population and replaced their accommodation with houses for the well-off; the artistic community which grew up in the late nineteenth century from which Chelsea derived its bohemian reputation; and the cultural and commercial changes of the Swinging Sixties.
M.C. Siraut
A History of the County of Somerset
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Authoritative and comprehensive account of one of Somerset's leading towns.
Castle Cary is a relatively unspoilt town deep in the Somerset countryside, its narrow streets rich in high-quality late eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings. Its most famous industry, horsehair weaving, still flourishes. This volume explores its history from the original castle and its lords to its rebirth as an industrial town. It also covers many villages, among them Ansford, early home of Parson Woodforde; Kingweston, virtually recreated bythe Dickinson family; Keinton Mandeville, once famous for its paving stone quarries and as the birthplace of Henry Irving; tiny Wheathill, almost obliterated by a golf course; and West Lydford, the family home of the early eighteenth-century diarist John Cannon. Other places of note include Barton St David, home of Henry Adams, the reputed ancestor of two American Presidents, and Lovington, whose small primary school traces its origins back to an eighteenth-century charity school.
M.C. Siraut is a historian and archivist; she is the county editor for the Victoria History of Somerset.
Margaret Connolly
Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England
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New essays on late medieval manuscripts highlight the complicated network of their production and dissemination.
One of the most important developments in medieval English literary studies since the 1980s has been the growth of manuscript studies. Long regarded as mere textual repositories, and treated superficially by editors, manuscripts are now acknowledged as centrally important in the study of later medieval texts. The essays collected here discuss aspects of the design and distribution of manuscripts in late medieval England, with a particular focus on vernacular manuscripts of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those in the first half consider material evidence for scribal decisions about design: these range from analysis of individual codices to broader discussions of particular types of manuscripts, both religious and secular. Later essays look at the evidence for the production and distribution of manuscripts of specific English texts or types of text. These include the major Middle English poems The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, as well as key religious works such as Love's Mirror, Hilton's Scale of Perfection, the Speculum Vitae and The Pricke of Conscience, all of which survive in significant numbers of manuscripts. The comparison of secular and devotional texts illuminates shared networks of production and dissemination, and increases our knowledge of regional and metropolitan book production in the period before printing.
Contributors: DANIEL W. MOSSER, JACOB THAISEN, TAKAKO KATO, SHERRY L. REAMES, AMELIA GROUNDS, ALEXANDRA BARRATT, JULIAN M. LUXFORD, LINNE R. MOONEY, MICHAEL G. SARGENT, JOHNJ. THOMPSON, MARGARET CONNOLLY, RALPH HANNA, GEORGE R. KEISER.
Richard Axton
Three Rastell Plays
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The three interludes in this volume come from the press of John Rastell, barrister, printer, adventurer, member of parliament, brother-in-law of Thomas More, and one of the first men in England to have a stage built at his own house. The Four Elements is unique in its genre of scientific morality play. Rastell composed it himself to expound the rudiments of natural science and to air his own frustrating experience of venturing to the New World, in 1517. The anonymous Calisto and Melebea is based on the beginning of the notorious Spanish novel, La Celestina, and has an elegance and subtlety in its satirical comedy of manners that is not found elsewhere in earlyEnglish drama. Gentleness and Nobiblitycrisply debates the case of aristocracy against meritocracy in a mocking humanist vein. It is probably by John Heywood, Rastell's son-on-law. The variety of the play testifies to Rastell's enterprise as publisher and their conmon theme of social responsibility to his strength of personality.
Hollie L.S. Morgan
Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England
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First full-length interdisciplinary study of the effect of these everyday surroundings on literature, culture and the collective consciousness of the late middle ages.
The bed, and the chamber which contained it, was something of a cultural and social phenomenon in late-medieval England. Their introduction into some aristocratic and bourgeois households captured the imagination of late-medievalEnglish society. The bed and chamber stood for much more than simply a place to rest one's head: they were symbols of authority, unparalleled spaces of intimacy, sanctuaries both for the powerless and the powerful. This change inphysical domestic space shaped the ways in which people thought about less tangible concepts such as gender politics, communication, God, sex and emotions. Furthermore, the practical uses of beds and chambers shaped and were shaped by artistic and literary production. This volume offers the first interdisciplinary study of the cultural meanings of beds and chambers in late-medieval England. It draws on a vast array of literary, pragmatic and visual sources, including romances, saints' lives, lyrics, plays, wills, probate inventories, letters, church and civil court documents, manuscript illumination and physical objects, to shed new light on the ways in which beds and chambersfunctioned as both physical and conceptual spaces.
Hollie L.S. Morgan is a Research Fellow in the School of History and Heritage, University of Lincoln.
Simon Townley
A History of the County of Oxford
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Authoritative account of the history of villages in the western parts of Oxfordshire, including Kelmscott, famous for its pre-Raphaelite associations.
Located on Oxfordshire's western fringe between the rivers Leach and Thames, the nine rural settlements covered in this volume are typical Cotswold villages, with their limestone-built farmhouses, their former open fields, and their extensive former sheep pastures. All belonged to a sizeable late Anglo-Saxon estate whose break-up gave rise to the later parish structure: Langford church, with its celebrated late eleventh-century tower, may have begun as a small minster. Excavations at Radcot have revealed much about the settlement's early character, including the discovery of a twelfth-century castle. The area as a whole is predominantly agricultural, though milling, malting and quarrying have all been significant. Woodland at Bradwell Grove was important from the middle ages. In later years the villages developed in diverse ways, displaying contrasting closed and open characteristics. The most famous village is arguably Kelmscott, where the designer William Morris rented Kelmscott Manor as a summer home from 1871; but Filkins was home to the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps, who worked with local craftsmen to build severalCotswold-style houses and community buildings there. Gentry houses include the nineteenth-century Gothic mansion at Bradwell Grove, which became the centre of a substantial estate and later of the Cotswold Wildlife Park.
Hannah Ryley
Re-using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England
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A fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, examining the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared.
During the "long fifteenth century" (here, 1375-1530), the demand for books in England flourished. The fast-developing book trade produced them in great quantity. Fragments of manuscripts were often repurposed, as flyleaves and other components such as palimpsests; and alongside the creation of new books, medieval manuscripts were also repaired, recycled and re-used.
This monograph examines the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared. Drawing on the codicological evidence gathered from an extensive survey of extant manuscript collections, in conjunction with historical accounts, recipes and literary texts, it presents detailed case studies exploring parchment production and recycling, the re-use of margins, and second-hand exchanges of books. Its engagement with the evidence in - and inscribed on - surviving books enables a fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, looking at how people went about re-using books, and arguing that over the course of this period, books were made, used and re-used in a myriad of sustainable ways.
Simon Townley
A History of the County of Oxford
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The latest volume for Oxfordshire is devoted to eight parishes between the market towns of Burford and Witney in the west of the county. The area is predominantly rural, the only urban centre being Carterton. Founded in 1900 as acolony of smallholders, it became one of the county's fastest growing towns after World War II due to its proximity to Brize Norton's military airbase. Oxfordshire: Volume XV is a richly detailed history of these parishes, covering everything from Anglo-Saxon settlement to 20th-century urbanisation, agriculture to rural industry, religious influences to famous residents.
Helen Lacey
The Royal Pardon: Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England
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Pioneering investigation of the royal pardon, at a time of major change in the system of English justice, showing the important part it continued to play.
The letter of pardon was a document familiar to the king's subjects in the middle ages; imbued with symbolic resonance as the judgement of the monarch, it also served a practical purpose, offering a last hope of reprieve from thedeath sentence or life as an outlaw. The fourteenth century in particular was a pivotal time of change for the system of English justice, and saw the evolution of a legal structure still recognisable today, yet the role of the royal pardon adapted and endured. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the royal pardon in fourteenth-century England, using evidence drawn from legal and literary texts, parliamentary records, yearbooks, and plea rolls to examine the full influence of royal mercy. Its implications go well beyond legal history, encompassing the major political and constitutional debates of the period, the theological underpinnings of royal mercy, and the social context of the law. Chapters analyse the procedures of pardoning, the role of royal mercy at moments of political upheaval (such as at the Peasants' Revolt), and the range of views expressed by legal theorists, parliamentary representatives, and by the diverse range of people who at one time or another had reason to seek royal mercy. The appendices provide full lists of all those who acted as "intercessors" for mercy; comprising over 1000 names, they reveal the role of women and personal servants of the crown, alongside the great nobles of the realm, in providing access to royal grace.
Dr HELEN LACEY is Lecturer in Late Medieval History at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.
Katherine Cross
Heirs of the Vikings
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Examination of texts concerning the vikings reveals much about their origin myth and legend.
Viking settlers and their descendants inhabited both England and Normandy in the tenth century, but narratives discussing their origins diverged significantly. This comparative study explores the depictions of Scandinavia and theevents of the Viking Age in genealogies, origin myths, hagiographies, and charters from the two regions. Analysis of this literary evidence reveals the strategic use of Scandinavian identity by Norman and Anglo-Saxon elites. Countering interpretations which see claims of Viking identity as expressions of contact with Scandinavia, the comparison demonstrates the local, political significance of these claims. In doing so, the book reveals the earliest origins of familiar legends which at once demonize and romanticize the Vikings - and which have their roots in both Anglo-Saxon and Norman traditions.
Dr KATHERINE CROSS is a historian of the early Middle Ages at the BritishMuseum and Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
M.C. Siraut
A History of the County of Somerset
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Meticulously-researched and detailed survey of Somerset parishes, from prehistory to the present day.
A comprehensive account of the ten parishes comprising the southern half of the Catsash hundred, an area rich in its archaeology and history, is presented here, in the authoritative detail which is the hallmark of the Victoria County History. To the north, the Barrows, of which Queen Camel, North Cadbury and Sparkford (home of the Haynes Motor Museum) are the largest and most populous, lying in an area rich in archaeology and history. To the south, prominent hills include Cadbury Hill, crowned by Cadbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort dating from 600-400 BC. In South Cadbury and the surrounding parishes there is much evidence of prehistoric activity such as Bronze-Age finds. From alater period, the manor at Queen Camel is recorded in 1066, though decimated by fire in 1639 and subsequently rebuilt in local Blue Lias stone; and the sites of abandoned medieval homesteads are visible at Sparkford, Weston Bampfylde, Sutton Montis and Maperton. Later still, Compton Castle in Compton Pauncefoot was constructed in 1821 while North Cadbury's medieval manor house still survives today. M.C. Siraut is a historian and archivist; she is the county editor for the Victoria History of Somerset.
Graham Kent
A History of the County of York: East Riding
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An authoritative and comprehensive account of an important area centred upon Great Driffield.
Great Driffield, a thriving market town serving an extensive agricultural hinterland, stands at the junction of the Yorkshire Wolds and Holderness. The centre of an important Anglo-Saxon manor, in royal hands in the early middle ages, the main settlement was transformed from a large village into a boom town following the opening of a canal in 1770 that linked it to the expanding markets of Hull and the West Riding; its social, religious and political lifeflourished in the Victorian period particularly. This volume covers its history and that of its adjoining rural townships of Little Driffield, Elmswell and Kelleythorpe, from the Neolithic period to the beginning of the twenty-first century; it provides the first detailed account of the town's trades and industries, as well as exploring landownership, local government, and social, religious and political life.
The editors are former staff of the University of Hull.
Dr Thomas W Smith
Petitions and Strategies of Persuasion in the Middle Ages
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An important new contribution to the emerging field of late medieval supplicatory cultures.
Late medieval petitions, providing unique insights into medieval social and legal history, have attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. This wide-ranging collection brings two approaches into dialogue with each other: the study of royal justice and secular petitions presented to the English crown, and the study of papal justice, canon law and ecclesiastical petitions (emphasising the international dimension of petitioning as a legal device exercising authority across Latin Christendom). In so doing, it crosses the traditional demarcation lines between secular and ecclesiastical systems of justice, of particular importance, given the participation by many litigantsand legislators in both of those legal spheres. A major focus is the mechanics of petitioning - who were the intermediaries in this process, and what were the "strategies of persuasion" they employed? The essays also re-examine the relationship between petitioners and their advisors, and the specific legal, rhetorical and linguistic choices they made in the composition of these texts. In so doing, the volume makes an important new contribution to theemerging field of late medieval supplicatory cultures.
THOMAS W. SMITH is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds; HELEN KILLICK is a post-doctoral researcher at the ICMA Centre, University of Reading.
Andrew Taylor
The Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel: Richard Sheale of Tamworth
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A reconstruction of the life and works of a sixteenth-century minstrel, showing the tradition to be flourishing well into the Tudor period.
Richard Sheale, a harper and balladeer from Tamworth, is virtually the only English minstrel whose life story is known to us in any detail. It had been thought that by the sixteenth century minstrels had generally been downgradedto the role of mere jesters. However, through a careful examination of the manuscript which Sheale almost certainly "wrote" (Bodleian Ashmole 48) and other records, the author argues that the oral tradition remained vibrant at this period, contrary to the common idea that print had by this stage destroyed traditional minstrelsy. The author shows that under the patronage of Edward Stanley, earl of Derby, and his son, from one of the most important aristocratic families in England, Sheale recited and collected ballads and travelled to and from London to market them. Amongst his repertoire was the famous Chevy Chase, which Sir Philip Sidney said moved his heart "more than witha trumpet". Sheale also composed his own verse, including a lament on being robbed of 60 on his way to London; the poem is reproduced in this volume.
ANDREW TAYLOR lectures in the Department of English, University of Ottawa.
Cedric E. Pickford
Arthurian Bibliography II
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Full indexes by topic, keyword and individual work\author form a complete subject-index, based on the indexes in source bibliographies. This is a complete bibliography of Arthurian literature to 1978, the result of five years' work by Professor Cedric Pickford and Dr Rex Last of the University of Hull. It consists of a complete alphabetical author-listing, with key numbers for each item, of all critical material recorded in the standard Arthurian bibliographies (Bruce, Modern Languages Quarterly, BBSIA and various other minor lists) with full indexes by topic, keyword and individual work,/author. The total is over 10,000 main entries, with all recorded reviews listed after each entry. Where summaries exist in BBSIA, this is indicated in the main entries. The computer programs have been specially devised and written for this bibliography by Dr Last, and programming and editing of the material has taken morethan two years. Updating volumes are planned to appear at five-year intervals.
Jean Wilson
Entertainments for Elizabeth I
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Edition, with notes and introductions, of the elaborate entertainments offered to Elizabeth by her courtiers.
The entertainments offered by Elizabethan courtiers to their Queen are a central part of the elaborate cult surrounding the figure of Elizabeth. Yet the fascinating literary texts written for these occasions have been comparatively neglected, despite years of growing interest in both "Gloriana" herself and the masques in general. This book presents an extended study of the entertainments by way of introduction to four of the actual texts. The general introduction examines the origins of the entertainments in court spectacles and pageants of the early Tudor period, and shows how they underline the central place of the cult of Elizabethan court life during her reign, as well as considering the literary traditions of chivalry and romance on which the texts of the entertainments rely so heavily. The four major texts edited here are: The Four Foster Children of Desire (1581), and those at Cowdray in 1591,Elvetham (1591), and Ditchley (1592). Two minor texts, on Bisham and Rycote (1592), are also included. Each text is preceded by an introduction and is fully annotated; there are also notes on the music and a full bibliography.
Jennifer Tonks Michaels
Franz Werfel and the Critics
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Discussion of critical response to German poet, playwright and novelist Werfel, 1890-1945.
This book is the first to discuss the critical response to Franz Werfel (1890-1945), the German writer acclaimed in several genres, poetry, drama and the novel. His first collection of lyric poetry, Der Weltfreund (1911), made him famous in German-speaking countries as a leading Expressionist poet, admired by his contemporaries; his dramas were premiered on important stages in Germany and Austria, and during his exile in America the Broadway production of his play Jacobowsky and the Colonel won a Critics' Award in 1944. As a novelist, Werfel gained much popular success, with English translations of his novels becoming bestsellers. However, after his death in 1945 hispopularity declined precipitately, and only recently has there been a revival of critical interest in his work. Franz Werfel and the Critics highlights the aspects of his work which have aroused the most critical interest,shows the trends in Werfel criticism which have shaped his reputation as a writer and thinker, and indicates areas for future research; it also discusses responses to Werfel's controversial religious and political beliefs.
Charles C. Rozier
Writing History in the Community of St Cuthbert, c.700-1130
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An examination of the extraordinary texts produced by the community of St Cuthbert, showing how they were used to construct and define an identity.
Historical texts of all kinds were written in the community of St Cuthbert c.700-1130, from short annals to extended narrative history, political tracts and works on the lives and miracles of saints.At the same time, scribes in the community worked to copy and procure notable classics of historiography, from Classical Antiquity down to the Norman Conquest of England. But what did these various forms of writing about past events mean to their original authors and readers? What were these texts for? This book offers a narrative of historiographical production within St Cuthbert's community from the time of its foundation on the island of Lindisfarne, through subsequent translations to Chester-le-Street and Durham, down to the vibrant intellectual revival of the Anglo-Norman period. Focusing on several watershed moments in the story of this community, it identifies political, religious, intellectual andcultural triggers for historical writing, and argues that knowledge of past events gave successive guardians of Cuthbert's cult their single most valuable tool in the continuous effort to define who they were, where they had comefrom, and what they hoped to continue to be.
Anna P. Baldwin
The Theme of Government in Piers Plowman
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Carolyn P. Collette
Rethinking Chaucer's Legend of Good Women
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A fresh reading of the Legend shows it to be one of Chaucer's most carefully crafted and significant works.
Professor Collette's approach to this challenging and provocative poem reflects her wide scholarly interests, her expertise in the area of representations of women in late medieval European society, and her conviction that the Legend of Good Women can be better understood when positioned within several of the era's intellectual concerns and historical contexts. The book will enrich the ongoing conversation among Chaucerians as to the significance of the Legend, both as an individual cultural production and an important constituent of Chaucer's poetic.achievement. A praiseworthy and useful monograph. Professor Robert Hanning, Columbia University.
The Legend of Good Women has perhaps not always had the appreciation or attention it deserves. Here, it is read as one of Chaucer's major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated work whose veneer of transparency and narrow focus masks a vital inquiry into basic questions of value, moderation, and sincerity in late medieval culture. The volume places Chaucer within several literary contexts developed in separate chapters: early humanist bibliophilia, translation and the development of the vernacular; late medieval compendia of exemplary narratives centred in women's choices written by Boccaccio, Machaut, Gower and Christine de Pizan; and the pervasive late fourteenth-century cultural influence of Aristotelian ideas of the mean, moderation, and value, focusing on Oresme's translations of the Ethics into French. It concludes with two chapters on the context of Chaucer's continual reconsideration of issues of exchange, moderation and fidelity apparent in thematic, figurative and semantic connections that link the Legend both to Troilus and Criseyde and to the women of The Canterbury Tales.
Carolyn Collette is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College and a Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.
John Cartwright
The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour by Sir Gilbert Hay
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Muriel Whitaker
Arthur's Kingdom of Adventure
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The setting of medieval Arthurian romance, as typified by Malory's Morte Darthur, plays an important part in the creation of the atmosphere of the stories, and in intensifying the drama of the action. Professor Whitaker looks at the Arthurianworld which Malory inherited form his sources and to which he added his own details, and examines its different aspects: castles and forests, kingdoms and empires, showing how these diverge from reality to meetthe particular requirements of romance, how new political and temporal relationships are set up for the same reason, and how it was shaped by the presence of the Otherworld in the Celtic stories from which many episodes were drawn.
Gwilym Dodd
The Reign of Edward II
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A new review of the most significant issues of Edward II's reign.
Edward II presided over a turbulent and politically charged period of English history, but to date he has been relatively neglected in comparison to other fourteenth and fifteenth-century kings. This book offers a significant re-appraisal of a much maligned monarch and his historical importance, making use of the latest empirical research and revisionist theories, and concentrating on people and personalities, perceptions and expectations, rather than dry constitutional analysis. Papers consider both the institutional and the personal facets of Edward II's life and rule: his sexual reputation, the royal court, the role of the king's household knights, the nature of law and parliament in the reign, and England's relations with Ireland and Europe.
Contributors: J.S. HAMILTON, W.M. ORMROD, IAN MORTIMER, MICHAEL PRESTWICH, ALISTAIR TEBBIT, W.R. CHILDS, PAUL DRYBURGH, ANTHONY MUSSON, GWILYM DODD, ALISON MARSHALL, MARTYN LAWRENCE, SEYMOUR PHILLIPS.
Nigel J. Tringham
A History of the County of Staffordshire
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Comprehensive and authoritative history of north-west Staffordshire, including Keele, Trentham and Audley.
Covering the hilly north-west part of the county from the Cheshire border to the valley of the river Trent south of Newcastle-under-Lyme, this volume treats parishes that lie mostly on the North Staffordshire coalfield and where both coal and ironstone mining and iron-making became important, especially in the nineteenth century. A rich archive has been used to illustrate the origins of this industrial activity in the Middle Ages, when the area was characterised by scattered settlements, with an important manorial complex and a grand fourteenth-century church at Audley, a hunting lodge for the Stafford lords at Madeley, a small borough at Betley, and at Keele and Trentham religioushouses which became landed estates with mansion houses after the Dissolution. In the nineteenth century Trentham gained fame for its spectacular gardens created by the immensely rich dukes of Sutherland, and Keele rose to prominence in 1950 as the site of Britain's first campus university. After coalmining ceased in the twentieth century several villages and mining hamlets acquired large housing estates, which in Trentham parish were absorbed into Stoke-on-Trent.
Nigel Tringham is a Senior Lecturer in History at Keele University, with special responsibility for researching and writing the volumes of the Staffordshire Victoria County History.
D.A. Crowley
A History of Wiltshire
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The history of Calne, a market and industrial town in north Wiltshire, and the places around it.
Calne, a small town in north Wiltshire, stood on a large royal estate, and the witan met there - St Dunstan survived the partial collapse of a building at one meeting. It sent members to parliament from the thirteenth century, andit became a pocket borough in the eighteenth. The town stands on what until 1971 was the main London to Bristol road; markets and fairs were held, and inns flourished. It was also industrial: water-powered mills were used for fulling, and from the sixteenth century to the 1840s it was a centre for cloth making. The topography of the town, its growth, government and cultural life are fully explored, and churches, chapels and schools discussed. In Calne's hinterland most settlement was in small villages with open fields and commonable pastures. Bowood park was inclosed from the forest c.1618 and Bowood House was built in the park c.1727. The house, the changes to it by Robert Adam and others, and the redesigning of its park by 'Capability' Brown are fully described. In the nineteenth century many estate cottages were built. For the places around Calne the history of the settlement and churches in each village, the manorial descents, and the evolution of farming and farms are all traced, and there are architectural descriptions of the churches.D.A.CROWLEY is County Editor, Victorial History of Wiltshire.
L. A. J. R. Houwen
The Deidis of Armorie
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David Dumville
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1 MS F
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Facsimile edition of an important witness to the impact of the Normans on the ecclesiastical culture of England.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS F [London, British Library, Cotton Domitian A.viii, folios 30-70] is unique in presenting a sustainedly bilingual [Latin and Old English] text. Palaeographicalevidence dates the manuscript to caAD1100; from its script it is clear that it was written at Canterbury. It is a witness - in language and script - to the impact of the Norman regime on the ecclesiastical culture of England and particularly its most important church. The evidence which it provides for the history of the Kentish dialect attests at the same time to the breakdown at Canterbury of the late West Saxon literary standard. In view of its importance in various contexts,the publisher and general editors now issue, as a supplementary volume to the collaborative edition, a complete facsimile of this interesting book as a preliminary to a new edition in the series, with an introduction outlining theproblems posed by the manuscript.
Professor DAVID DUMVILLE is Professor of History and Palaeography at the University of Aberdeen.
Nigel J. Tringham
A History of the County of Stafford
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Authoritative and comprehensive history of the town of Tamworth and its environs.
In the centre of a parish with several townships, Tamworth was important for the rulers of pre-Viking Mercia and became a burh in 913 under Æthelflæd, "lady of the Mercians", who may also have installed relics of St Edith in the church there. Although a castle was built after the Norman Conquest, its lords did not control the town, which became a corporation under Elizabeth I and is now the head of a district council. Throughout its history Tamworth has functioned as a market centre, with some cloth-working and paper-making, although cotton mills, opened by Robert Peel (the later Prime Minster's father), just outside the town in the 1790s were soon moved to a canal junction to the south in Fazeley, where tape-making survived (as also in the town) until the late twentieth century. Deposits of coal and clay exploited from the nineteenth century resulted in mining villages at Glascote and Wilnecote inthe eastern half of the parish, which lay in Warwickshire, as did half the town until transferred to Staffordshire in 1890. The Warwickshire part of the parish was added in 1965 in connection with the decision to take in a Birmingham overspill population, which together with private developments created vast housing estates, the population of "greater Tamworth" more than doubling by the early 21st century. The volume also includes the adjoining parish of Drayton Bassett, which had close links with the town and where Peel built a mansion house, demolished in the earlier twentieth century: its site is now part of a major amusement park.
Carolyne Larrington
Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature
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A wideranging and groundbreaking investigation of the sibling relationship as shown in European literature, from 500 to 1500.
The literature of the European Middle Ages attends closely to the relationship of brother and sister, laying bare sibling behaviours in their most dramatic forms as models to emulate, to marvel at or to avoid. The literary treatment of siblings opens up multiple perspectives on brothers' and sisters' emotions: love, hate, rivalry, desire, nurturing and ambivalence underlie sibling stories. These narratives are in turn inflected by rank, social context andmost crucially, gender. This book examines these sibling relationships, focusing on the important vernacular literatures of Iceland, France, England and Germany, and building on recent research on siblings in psychology, history and social science. Multiple and subtle patterns in sibling interaction are teased out, such as the essential sibling task of "borderwork" (the establishment of individuality despite genetic resemblance), and the tensions caused by the easy substitutability of one sibling for another in certain social situations. When the sibling bond is extended to the in-law relation, complex emotional, strategic and political forces and powerful ambivalences nuancethe relationship still further. Quasi-siblings: foster- or sworn-brothers complete the sibling picture in ways which reflect and contrast with the sibling blood-tie.
Carolyne Larrington is a Fellow and Tutor in medieval English literature at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Daniel J DiCenso
Chant, Liturgy, and the Inheritance of Rome
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The influence of Rome on medieval plainsong and liturgy explored in depth.
Containing substantial new studies in music, liturgy, history, art history, and palaeography from established and emerging scholars, this volume takes a cross-disciplinary approach to one of the most celebrated and vexing questions about plainsong and liturgy in the Middle Ages: how to understand the influence of Rome? Some essays address this question directly, examining Roman sources, Roman liturgy, or Roman practice, whilst others consider the sway ofRome more indirectly, by looking later sources, received practices, or emerging traditions that owe a foundational debt to Rome.
Daniel J. DiCenso is Assistant Professor of Music at the College of the Holy Cross; Rebecca Maloy is Professor of Musicology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Contributors: Charles M. Atkinson, Rebecca A. Baltzer, James Borders, Susan Boynton, Catherine Carver, Daniel J. DiCenso, David Ganz, Barbara Haggh-Huglo, David Hiley, Emma Hornby, Thomas Forrest Kelly, William Mahrt, Charles B. McClendon, Luisa Nardini, Edward Nowacki , Christopher Page, Susan Rankin, John F. Romano, Mary E. Wolinski
Richard Barber
Arthurian Literature V
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Jaclyn Rajsic
The Prose Brut and Other Late Medieval Chronicles
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Essays on the medieval chronicle tradition, shedding light on history writing, manuscript studies and the history of the book, and the post-medieval reception of such texts.
The histories of chronicles composed in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and onwards, with a focus on texts belonging to or engaging with the Prose Brut tradition, are the focus of this volume. The contributors examine the composition, dissemination and reception of historical texts written in Anglo-Norman, Latin and English, including the Prose Brut chronicle (c. 1300 and later), Castleford's Chronicle (c. 1327),and Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles (c. 1334), looking at questions of the processes of writing, rewriting, printing and editing history. They cross traditional boundaries of subject and period, taking multi-disciplinary approaches to their studies in order to underscore the (shifting) historical, social and political contexts in which medieval English chronicles were used and read from the fourteenth century through to the present day. As such, the volume honours the pioneering work of the late Professor Lister M. Matheson, whose research in this area demonstrated that a full understanding of medieval historical literature demands attention to both the content of theworks in question and to the material circumstances of producing those works.
JACLYN RAJSIC is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London; ERIK KOOPER taughtOld and Middle English at Utrecht University until his retirement in 2007; DOMINIQUE HOCHE Is an Associate Professor at West Liberty University in West Virginia.
Contributors: Elizabeth J. Bryan, Caroline D. Eckhardt,A.S.G. Edwards, Dan Embree, Alexander L. Kaufman, Edward Donald Kennedy, Erik Kooper, Julia Marvin, William Marx, Krista A. Murchison, Heather Pagan, Jaclyn Rajsic, Christine M. Rose, Neil Weijer
Patricia Croot
A History of the County of Middlesex
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Authoritative, comprehensive history of the City of Westminster.
The City of Westminster is the seat of the monarchy and government of Great Britain and the centre of many aspects of British economic and cultural life, yet to date there has been no comprehensive history of the city. It is thisgap which this volume will fill. The book opens with an explanation of what makes Westminster unique and follows with detailed sections on landownership and religious history. The section on landownership treats the history and ownership of the manors, the large medieval inns, and the estates created from the 16th century onwards; that on religious history provides a general chronological introduction to religious life in the city, and detailed accounts of the history and buildings of all the Christian denominations and other Faiths.
PATRICIA CROOT is at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Julia C. Crick
Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV
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Catalogue and scholarly consideration of these vital manuscripts.
Following her vital cataloguing of the surviving 200+ manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniein Volume III, Julia Crick has been able in Volume IV to present the information which the manuscripts contain both about thetextual development of Geoffrey's History and about its circulation and audience. Crick begins by exploring the evidence for grouping the manuscripts. External evidence such as associated texts found frequently with the Historiais compared with the internal evidence of textual disruption, the notorious dedications, rubrication and trial passages collated from each manuscript. This information forms the basis for an account of the chronologyand geography of the circulation of the work as a whole, which in turn sheds light on the audience of the Historia, their taste in reading, and their status.JULIA CRICKis a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Arthurian Boydell & Brewer have become the Arthurian publishers par excellence, not simply for their excellent secondary material on the once and future king, but for their commitment to the publication of a largely Cambridge-based inquiry into the primeval sources of the Arthurian story. ENGLISH STUDIES [J.D. Burnley] Following the cataloguing of the 200 surviving manuscripts of Geoffrey's HistoriaJulia Crick sets out to assesswhat these reveal about the textual development of the work and about its circulation and audience. Her meticulous and scholarly approach prises out information which will prove invaluable to all students of the 12th century.
Peter Happe
Complete Plays of John Bale volume I
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Nigel J. Morgan
English Monastic Litanies of the Saints after 1100
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Edition of rare surviving litanies from the middle ages, providing evidence for monastic worship.
The litanies of the monastic orders in England, above all those of the Benedictines, are key witnesses of devotion to the saints of the British Isles, whose relics and shrines were mostly in Benedictine abbeys and cathedral priories. However, although many of the calendars of the Benedictines have been published, litanies are more rare, and the majority of those within this volume are presented as text editions for the first time. The majority of the textsare Benedictine, but the few surviving litanies from the other monastic orders, Carthusians, Cistercians and Cluniacs, are included, and also those of the Order of Fontevrault. This volume, the second of a set of three, contains the litanies from the Cluniac Priory of Pontefract to York, St Mary's Abbey.
Nigel Morgan is Honorary Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.
Ralph Hanna
The Taill of Rauf Coilyear
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First edition of a lively medieval romance.
The author of the fifteenth-century Older Scots romance of Rauf Coilyear may be unknown, but the popularity of this comic king-in-disguise tale is undisputed; it is cited by William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas at the turn of the century, and again in the mid-sixteenth century Complaynt of Scotland. The disguised king in this case is Charlemagne, and the hero a bluff collier called Ralph, who unwittingly plays host to him for one stormy night and teaches his bemused guest some rough lessons in his own version of courtesy. When Ralph is lured to court, the mistaken identities continue as he encounters the great Sir Roland and battles Saracens. Throughout, the scrappy hero maintains his dignity, as indeed does his king: both parties finish the tale immensely pleased with each other and with the bond they have forged. The text survives only in a 1572 print by Robert Lekpreuik (whose own career seems tohave been only marginally less exciting than Rauf's: he printed it in St Andrews while attempting to evade imprisonment in Edinburgh, ultimately without success). It is edited here with an introduction and notes.
RALPHHANNA is Emeritus Professor of Palaeography, University of Oxford.
R. W. Dunning
A History of the County of Somerset
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Somerset's Polden hills divide the county's central marshlands, Sedgemoor to the south and the Brue Valley to the north. Traces of human activity there include wooden trackways built across those marshes six thousand years ago. Most of the written sources tell the story of men from settlements on the nearby hills or isolated 'islands' who looked to those low-lying lands for food and fuel for themselves and food for their stock. Those sources, dating from the late Saxon period and particularly rich in the middle ages, derive largely from the archives of the former abbey of Glastonbury, main landowner in the eighteen parishes of this volume. Pastoral farming dominated and still dominates, its early progress due to successful drainage and flood-prevention schemes, one of the largest dating from the late twelfth century. Each parish has its own long story: of Glastonbury-planned origins at Shapwick and perhaps also at Catcott, Edington, and Chilton Polden; of trade along the tidal river Parrett at Huntspill and Puriton (Dunball); of the gradual expansion of the 'island' farmers of Westonzoyland, Middlezoy and Othery into the surrounding marsh; of the long-enduring common arable fields at High Ham; of the rise and fall of peat digging. ROBERT DUNNING is County Editor, Victoria County History of Somerset. Forthcoming: IX: Glastonbury and Street
Michele Campopiano
Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages
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Essays demonstrating the importance and inflence of Italian culture on medieval Britain.
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rise of international trade, the growth of towns and cities, and the politics of diplomacy all helped to foster productive and far-reaching connections and cultural interactions between Britain and Italy; equally, the flourishing of Italian humanism from the late fourteenth century onwards had a major impact on intellectual life in Britain.
The aim of this book is to illustrate the continuity and the variety of these exchanges during the period. Each chapter focuses on a specific area (book collection, historiography, banking, commerce, literary production), highlighting the significance of the productive interchange of people and ideas across diverse cultural communities; it is the lived experience of individuals, substantiated by written evidence, that shapes the book's collective understanding of how two European cultures interacted with each other so fruitfully.
MICHELE CAMPOPIANO is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Latin Literature at the University of York; HELEN FULTON is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol.
Contributors: Helen Bradley, Margaret Bridges, Michele Campopiano, Carolyn Collette, Victoria Flood, Helen Fulton, Bart Lambert, Ignazio del Punta
Renee L. Curtis
Le Roman de Tristan en prose III
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Renee Curtis's three-volume critical edition of the Prose Tristan is the only edition of this very important medieval work ever published; until the first volume appeared in 1963, the work was only accessible in the form of a fewfragments which had been edited and a summary of the romance made by E. Loseth in 1891. Dr Curtis's edition is based on a complete collation of all the manuscripts and this led her to choose the Carpentras manuscript 404 as thebasis of her edition. This second volume appeared in1976. Professor Brian Woledge, the eminent medievalislt, wrote of the first volume in Erasmus: "The publication of this book is an event of some importance in Arthurian studies. The Prose Tristan was one of the most widely read works in medieval France; written between1215 and 1235, it continued to be copied until the end of the Middle Ages and its popularity lasted another hundred years in printededitions. It was in fact in prose rather than in poetic form that the legend was known.... Dr Curtis is to warmly congratulated on undertaking this important task"
Linne R Mooney
Scribes and the City
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Scribes played a crucial part in the flourishing and availability of literature in English during the time of Chaucer. This book reveals for the first time who they were, where and how they worked, and the crucial role they playedin bringing this literature to a wider public.
A sensational book... will permanently affect and change the way we see the history of the book in England. Professor Derek Pearsall, Harvard University.
Geoffrey Chaucer is called the Father of English Literature notbecause he was the first author to write in English - he wasn't - but because his works were among those of his generation produced in sufficient numbers to reach a wider audience. He and his contemporaries wrote before the age of print, so the dissemination of his writings in such quantity depended upon scribes, who would manually copy works like The Canterbury Tales in manuscripts. This book is the first to identify the scribes responsible for the copying of the earliest manuscripts (including Chaucer's famous scribe, Adam). The authors reveal these revolutionary copyists as clerks holding major bureaucratic offices at the London Guildhall, working for the mayor andaldermen, officiating in their courts, and recording London business in their day jobs - while copying medieval English literature as a sideline. In particular, they contributed to the new culture of English as the language of notonly literature, but government and business as well.
LINNE R. MOONEY is Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Department of English and Related Literature, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studiesat the University of York; ESTELLE STUBBS is a researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Priscilla Bawcutt
The EneadosGavin Douglas's Translation of Virgil's Aeneid.
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First volume in a new edition of Douglas's "Eneados", providing a comprehensive introduction and commentary.
Although Virgil's Aeneid was one of the most widely admired works of the European Middle Ages, the first complete translation to appear in any form of English was Gavin Douglas's magisterial verse rendering into Older Scots, completed in 1513, which he called the "Eneados". It included not only the twelve books of Virgil's original, but a thirteenth added by the Italian humanist scholar Maphaeus Vegius, and lively, original prologues to every book.D.F.C. Coldwell's four-volume modern edition of it was published in 1957-64 for the Scottish Text Society, but for some time now has needed revision. This new edition will provide a corrected version of Coldwell's text and variants in subsequent volumes. The first volume, here, the Introduction and Commentary, offers a wealth of new scholarship, comparing Douglas's text to his exact Latin source (first identified by Professor Bawcutt in a 1973 essay reprinted here); vastly expanding the Commentary; offering detailed new analysis of the manuscript and print witnesses to the text and its early reception and circulation; and surveying modern Douglas criticism. There is also a new Bibliography.
Simon Townley
A History of the County of Oxford
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Authoritative account of the history of Henley-on-Thames and its neighbouring parishes.
Focused on the south-west Chilterns, this volume looks at the riverside market town of Henley-on-Thames, now famous for its annual Royal Regatta, and at the four neighbouring parishes of Bix, Harpsden, Rotherfield Greys and Rotherfield Peppard. Henley began as a planned town, probably in the late twelfth century, and became a major inland port, funnelling grain, wood and (later) malt into London. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it developed as a coaching centre, and from the nineteenth flourished as a fashionable resort and commuting area, following the belated arrival of the railway and the self-conscious promotion of the Regatta. The adjoining parishes stretch from the river to the Chilterns uplands, comprising a mixed landscape of wood pasture, small hedged closes, and (in the Middle Ages) small open fields. Settlement is characteristically dispersed, and as elsewhere in the Chilterns the balance between crops, grazing and wood exploitation varied over time. The area contains deserted or shrunken settlements, including Bolney and the newly-discovered site of Bix Gibwyn church; its important buildings include Greys Court, established probably in the eleventh century, while Henley itself contains a richness of eighteenth-century brick-built houses alongside medieval timber-framing, several examples of which have recently been dated by dendrochronology.
Julia Marvin
The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle
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First full-length interpretive study of the prose Brut tradition, setting its manuscript context alongside textual analysis.
The prose Brut chronicle was the most popular vernacular work of the late Middle Ages in England, setting a standard for vernacular historical writing well into the age of print, but until recently it has attracted little scholarly attention. This book combines a study of the chronicle's sources, content, and methods of composition, with its manuscript contexts. Using the Anglo-Norman Oldest Version as a touchstone, it investigates the chronicle's social ideals, its representation of women, and its distinctive versions of such elements of British history as the Trojan foundation myth, the ruin of the Britons, the Norman Conquest, and Arthur and Merlin, arguing that its humane, populist vision demands reassessment of medieval popular understandings of British history, and of the presumed dominance of imperialism, next-worldly piety, misogyny, and a taste for violence in late-medieval culture. The book also analyses evidence for the production of the Anglo-Norman Brut, and examines the ways in which its makers and users reconstructed British history through manuscript context, ordinatio and apparatus, annotationand illustration.
Julia Marvin is a Fellow of the Medieval Institute and Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Marion Glasscoe
The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England IV
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These papers are the proceedings of the fourth international Exeter Symposium. They promote enquiry into, and understanding of, the medieval mystics and the cultural context to which they belong. Here, historians, literary critics, theologians, philosophers and bibliographical scholars explore ways in which the contemplative tradition was mediated and perceived in the very early and very late medieval period, and ask fundamental questions about the natureof contemporary understanding of this subject.
CONTRIBUTORS: GEORGE R. KEISER, SUE ELLEN HOLBROOK, WILLIAM F. POLLARD, JAMES HOGG, SANDRA MCENTIRE, ANNE SAVAGE, PETER DINZELBACHER, NICHOLAS WATSON, PETER MOORE, ROBERT K.FORMAN
Professor Francesca Tinti
Constructing History across the Norman Conquest
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An investigation into the hugely significant works produced by the Worcester foundation at a period of turmoil and change.
From the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century Worcester was a monastic community of unparalleled importance. Not only was it home to many of the most famous bishops and monks of the period, including Bishop Wulfstan II: it was also a centre of notable and ambitious scholarly production. Under Wulfstan's guidance, a number of Worcester brethren undertook historical research that resulted in the writing of such renowned texts as Hemming's Cartulary and the Worcester Chronica Chronicarum. Significantly, these historical endeavours spanned the political chasm of the Norman Conquest. The essays collected here aim to shed new light on different aspects of the Worcester "historical workshop", whose literary ouput was, in several respects, pioneering in contemporary European scholarship. Several chapters address the different ways in which the monks organised and updated their archives of documents, both via their sequence of cartularies, with a special focus on the narrative parts of Hemming's Cartulary, and via an interesting (and previously unedited) prose account of the foundation of the see. Others focus on the famous Worcester Chronica Chronicarum, attributed both to Florence and to John, investigating the major model for its composition and structure (the work of Marianus Scotus), the stages in which it was completed, and its connections with Welsh chronicles, as well as the related and fascinating abbreviated version, written mostly in the hand of John himself, and known as the Chronicula. The volume thus elucidates how the Worcester monks navigated the period across the Conquest through the composition of different genres of texts, and how these texts shaped their own institutional memory.
Ruth J. Salter
Saints, Cure-Seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-Century England
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Traces the journey from ill health to miraculous cure through the lens of hagiographical texts from twelfth-century England.
The cults of the saints were central to the medieval Church. These holy men and women acted as patrons and protectors to the religious communities who housed their relics and to the devotees who requested their assistance in petitioning God for a miracle. Among the collections of posthumous miracle stories, miracula, accounts of holy healing feature prominently and depict cure-seekers successfully securing their desired remedy for a range of ailments and afflictions. What can these miracle accounts tell us of the cure-seekers' experiences of their journey from ill health to recovery, and how was healthcare presented in these sources?
This book aims to answer these questions via an in-depth study of the miraculous cure-seeking process, considering Latin miracle accounts produced in twelfth-century England, a time both when saints' cults flourished and there was an increasing transmission and dissemination of classical and Arabic medical works. Focused on seven shorter miracula (including Eadmer of Canterbury's Miracula S. Dunstani and Thomas of Monmouth's Vita et Passione S. Wilelmi Martyris Norwicensis) with a predominantly localised appeal, and thus on a select group of cure-seekers - including Abbot Osbert of Notley who suffered from an eye complaint, Leofmær the bedridden knight, and Gaufrid who experienced a bad tooth extraction - the volume brings together studies of healthcare and pilgrimage, looking at the alternative to secular medical intervention and the practicalities and processes of securing saintly assistance.
Laura Cleaver
Writing History in the Anglo-Norman World
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The contexts for the works of eleventh and twelfth-century historians are here brought to the fore.
History was a subject popular with authors and readers in the Anglo-Norman world. The volume and richness of historical writing in the lands controlled by the kings of England, particularly from the twelfth century, has long attracted the attention of historians and literary scholars, whilst editions of works by such writers as Orderic Vitalis, John of Worcester, Symeon of Durham, William of Malmesbury, Gerald of Wales, Roger of Howden, and Matthew Paris has made them well known. Yet the easy availability of modern editions obscures both the creation and circulation of histories in the Middle Ages. This collection of essays returns to the processes involved in writing history, and in particular to the medieval manuscript sources in which the works of such historians survive. It explores the motivations of those writing about the past in the Middle Ages, and the evidence provided by manuscripts for the circumstances in which copies were made. It also addresses the selection of material for copying, combinations of text and imagery, and the demand for copies of particular works, shedding new light on how and why history was being read, reproduced, discussed, adapted, and written.
LAURA CLEAVER is Senior Lecturer in Manuscript Studies, Institute of English Studies, University of London; ANDREA WORM is Professor of Art History. Kunsthistorischen Institut, Eberhard Karls University, Tubingen.
Contributors: Stephen Church, Kathryn Gerry, Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Laura Pani, Charles C. Rozier, Gleb Schmidt, Laura Slater, Michael Staunton, Caoimhe Whelan, Andrea Worm
Nicholas Bennett
Lincolnshire Parish Clergy, c.1214-1968: A Biographical Register
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The second volume in what will be a complete biographical record of all parish priests in Lincolnshire.
The parish churches of Lincolnshire are justly celebrated. The spires of Grantham and Louth, and the famous Boston Stump, provide a focal point from the surrounding landscape of fen, wold and marsh. The charms of remote country churches along the byways of the county have been extolled in prose and verse by writers such as Henry Thorold and Sir John Betjeman. Their architecture, their stained glass and sculpture, furniture and fabric, have all been carefully recorded. Yet little is known of the people who served these churches, the rectors and vicars who, in word and sacrament, taught the Christian faith to successive generations of parishioners. This volume forms the second part of a much-needed survey of Lincolnshire parish clergy. It covers the deaneries of Beltisloe, comprising twenty-one parishes clustered around Colsterworth and Corby, and of Bolingbroke, with twenty-five parishes centred on Spilsby. Starting from 1214, when Bishop Hugh of Wells introduced the earliest system of episcopal registration in Western Europe, the parish lists set out the succession of rectors or vicars for each church. Brief biographical sketches demonstrate the rich variety of the county's parsons - pastors, scholars, athletes, travellers and writers, soldiers and schoolmasters. This register gives to each of them his place in the history of Lincolnshire.
DrNicholas Bennett is Visiting Senior Fellow of the University of Lincoln.
Reima Välimäki
Heresy in Late Medieval Germany
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First major survey of the German inquisitor Petrus Zwicker, one of the most significant figures in the repression of heresy.
In the final years of the fourteenth century, waves of persecution shattered German-speaking Waldensian communities, with the scale of inquisitions matching or even greater than the better-known trials in southern France. In the middle of the persecution was the influential and enigmatic figure of the Celestine provincial and inquisitor of heresy, Petrus Zwicker (d.after 1404). His surviving texts and inquisition protocols offer a fresh, intriguing picture of the medieval repression of heresy. Zwicker was an accurate and intelligent interrogator with direct access to the Waldensians' sources and knowledge. But although he is one of the most effective inquisitors of the MiddleAges, he was even more important as the author of anti-heretical texts. His Cum dormirent homines became a standard work on Waldensianism in the fifteenth century (and this study attributes another anti-heretical treatise,the Refutatio errorum, to him). With his unique biblicist and pastoral style, Zwicker struck the right note at a moment when the Church was in crisis. His texts spread rapidly, they were preached to the people and translated into German, and helped to build the fear of heresy, anti-clericalism and disobedience in the years of the Great Western Schism. This book is the first full-length study on Zwicker and his significance to the history of heresy and its repression. It offers a meticulous analysis of the sources left by him and teases out new, ground-breaking discoveries from careful examination of previously poorly known manuscripts.
Dr REIMA VALIMAKI isa postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku
Laura Cleaver
Lost Artefacts from Medieval England and France
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Contemporary descriptions of objects no longer extant examined to reconstruct these lost treasures.
Surviving accounts of the material culture of medieval Europe - including buildings, boats, reliquaries, wall paintings, textiles, ivory mirror cases, book bindings and much more - present a tantalising glimpse of medieval life, hinting at the material richness of that era. However, students and scholars of the period will be all too familiar with the frustration of trying to piece together a picture of the past from a handful of fragments. The "material turn" has put art, architecture, and other artefacts at the forefront of historical and cultural studies, and the resulting spotlight on the material culture of the past has been illuminating for researchers in many fields. Nevertheless, the loss of so much of the physical remnants of the Middle Ages continues to thwart our understanding of the period, and much of the knowledge we often take for granted is based on a series of arbitrary survivals.
The twelve essays in this book draw on a wide array of sources and disciplines to explore how textual records, from the chronicles of John of Worcester and Matthew Paris and inventories of monastic treasuries and noble women to Beowulf and early English riddles, when combined with archaeological and art-historical evidence, can expand our awareness of artistic and cultural environments. Touching on a broad range of issues around how we imaginatively reconstruct the medieval past and a variety of objects, both precious and ephemeral, this volume will be of fundamental interest to medieval scholars, whatever their disciplinary field.
Contributors: Katherine Baker, Marian Bleeke, Deirdre Carter, Laura Cleaver, Judith Collard, Joshua Davies, Kathryn Gerry, Karl Kinsella, Katherine A. Rush, Katherine Weikert, Beth Whalley, Victoria Yuskaitis
Philip Riden, Dudley Fowkes
A History of the County of Derby
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The history of the town of Bolsover and neighbouring parishes, from prehistory to the present day.
The history and topography of the small market town of Bolsover in north-east Derbyshire and four parishes immediately to its north (Barlborough, Clowne, Elmton - including Creswell - and Whitwell) are covered in this volume. Alllie mainly on a magnesian limestone ridge, rather than the exposed coalfield, and therefore only became mining communities late in the nineteenth century. Since the end of deep mining in Derbyshire all have faced a difficult period of economic and social adjustment. As well as the general development of the five parishes, the book includes detailed accounts of the medieval castle at Bolsover, the mansion built on the site of the castle by the Cavendish family of Welbeck in the seventeenth century, and Barlborough Hall, a late sixteenth-century prodigy house built by a successful Elizabethan lawyer.
Philip Riden teaches in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham; he has been the editor of the Victoria County History of Derbyshire since 1996, when he re-established the VCH in the county.
David Lawton
Chaucer's Narrators
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The book begins with a brief prefatory discussion of its relation to structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. The first chapter, `Apocryphal Voices', surveys the basis of modern critical approaches to persona and `irony' in Chaucer's poetry, and suggests that such approaches are better suited to unequivocally written contexts. A systematic hesitation between a wholly written and a wholly spoken context requires critical distinctions between types of persona, and a number of distinctions in the range between persona and voice. `Morality in its Context' examines the Pardoner and his tale and argues against a `dramatic' view of the tale itself, while the third chapter, 'Chaucer's Development of Persona', is a study of possible sources for Chaucer's handling of the narratorial '1', looking at the English `disour', the French `dits amoureux', Italian and Latin sources of influence, and the Roman de la Rose. The last two chapters apply the principles outlined so far to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, with a particular examination of the literary history of the Squire'stale to show that modern interest in dramatic persona has obscured many other important issues and leads to drastic misreading. This is a challenging and lucid work which questions many of the received attitudes of recentChaucer criticism, and offers a reasoned and approachable alternative view.
Susanna Fein, Michael Johnston
Robert Thornton and his Books
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Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections.
The Yorkshire landowner Robert Thornton (c.1397- c.1465) copied the contents of two important manuscripts, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 (the "Lincoln manuscript"), and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042 (the "London manuscript") in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Viewed in combination, his books comprise a rare repository of varied English and Latin literary, religious and medical texts that survived the dissolution of the monasteries, when so many other medieval books were destroyed. Residing in the texts he copied and used are many indicators of what this gentleman scribe of the North Riding read, how he practised his religion, and what worldly values he held for himself and his family. Because of the extraordinary nature of his collected texts - Middle English romances, alliterative verse (the alliterative Morte Arthure only exists here), lyrics and treatises of religion ormedicine - editors and scholars have long been deeply interested in uncovering Thornton's habits as a private, amateur scribe. The essays collected here provide, for the first time, a sustained, focussed light on Thornton and hisbooks. They examine such matters as what Thornton as a scribe made, how he did it, and why he did it, placing him in a wider context and looking at the contents of the manuscripts.
Susanna Fein is Professor of Englishat Kent State University; Michael Johnston is an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University.
Contributors: Julie Nelson Couch, Susanna Fein, Rosalind Field, Joel Fredell, Ralph Hanna, Michael Johnston, George R. Keiser, Julie Orlemanski, Mary Michele Poellinger, Dav Smith, Thorlac Turville-Petre.
Christopher C. Thornton
A History of the County of Essex
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An important contribution to the social, cultural and economic history of seaside resorts and their hinterland in Essex.
The nine Essex parishes lying in a coastal district between St Osyth and the Naze headland at Walton encompass a number of distinct landscapes, from sandy cliffs to saltmarshes, recognised as environmentally significant. The landscape has constantly changed in response to changing sea levels, flooding, draining and investment in sea defences. Inland, there was an agriculturally fertile plateau based on London Clay, but with large areas of Kesgrave sands and gravels, loams and brickearths. Parts were once heavily wooded, especially at St Osyth. The district was strongly influenced by the pattern of estate ownership, largely held by St Paul's Cathedral from the mid-10th century.About 1118-19 a bishop of London founded a house of Augustinian canons at St Osyth, which became one of the wealthiest abbeys in Essex. Most other manors and their demesnes in the district were small and their demesne tenants were of little more than local significance. After the Reformation all of the former church lands in the district were granted to the royal servant Thomas Darcy, 1st baron Darcy of Chiche (d. 1558). Darcy built a great mansion, St Osyth Priory, on the site of the former abbey, which became the centre of his new estate. The area's economy was strongly affected by the coast and its many valuable natural resources, including the extraction or manufacture ofsand, gravel, septaria, copperas and salt, and activities such as fishing, tide milling, wrecking and smuggling. However, it remained a largely rural district and its wealth ultimately depended upon the state of farming. Until the eighteenth century it specialised in dairying from both sheep and cattle, but afterwards production shifted towards grain. The coastal area has produced significant evidence of early man and was heavily exploited and settled in prehistory. The medieval settlement pattern largely conformed to a typical Essex model, with a complex pattern of small villages, hamlets and dispersed farms, many located around greens or commons. The largest settlement wasthe nucleated village or small town at St Osyth, located outside the abbey gates, which had a formal market and wool fair in the Middle Ages.In the 19th and 20th centuries the coast witnessed the development of seaside resorts atWalton, Clacton and Frinton. Some overspill affected the surrounding more rural parishes, and from the 1920s new types of resort developed in the form of seaside camps, chalets and caravan parks.
Craig Taylor
A Virtuous Knight
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A radical re-interpretation of the chivalric biography of Boucicaut.
The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre (1409) is one of the most famous chivalric biographies of the Middle Ages. It presents Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut (1366-1421), as an ideal knight and role model, and has frequently been seen by modern scholars as a last-ditch effort to defend traditional chivalric values that were supposedly in decline. Here, however, Craig Taylor argues that the biography is a much more complex and interesting text, fusing traditional notions of chivalry with the most fashionable new ideas in circulation at the French court at the start of the fifteenth century. Rather than a nostalgic criticism of contemporary knighthood, it should be seen as a showcase of the latest ideas on chivalry, written to renew the enthusiasm of the great French princes for a man who was in grave danger of falling out of favour: its purpose was to celebrate and to defend a beleaguered Boucicaut against his critics at the royal court, and to explain his actions as governor of Genoa, his failed crusading enterprises in the Eastern Mediterranean and his unsuccessful efforts to broker a solution to the Papal Schism.
CRAIG TAYLOR is a Reader in Medieval History at the University of York; he was Director of its Centre for Medieval Studies from 2010 to 2011 and from 2014 to 2017.
George Redmonds, Alexandra Medcalf
The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary
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An invaluable reference work, providing definitions for a plethora of words old and new from Yorkshire's dialect.
This volume offers an unparalleled collection of words and phrases gleaned from Yorkshire's archives. The language it contains tells the story of Yorkshire in the words of the people who experienced it, providing a powerful new look at the county's intangible heritage and what it means to be from Yorkshire. The Dictionary uses a broad range of sources to widen the English lexicon, with new vocabulary for (among others) by-names and place-names; for agricultural and animal terms; and for specialist craft and industries. As well as new words such as fulture (a mixture of manure and bedding), working tree (a stand for hides to be worked upon), stonery (a place where stones could be quarried), and wand hagger (part of a wood set out for producing wands, or saplings, for baskets, hurdles, etc.), there are earlier references to established words that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, such as necessary-house (privy, here from 1414 compared to 1609), orange (as a colour, here from 1504 compared to 1600) and oliver (a tilt hammer, used by early iron-workers, here from 1350, compared to 1846). The Dictionary also fills in in gaps in our understanding of the development of regional language, from "borrowings" from the Baltic and Low Countries to its decline from the Tudor period on.
This is the first time such a comprehensive glossary of regional words has been published. Its wide-ranging scope, underpinned with excellent scholarship, means this volume will be of interest not just to historians of Yorkshire, but to local historians across the country, as well as linguists and place-name and surname researchers.
Claire Weeda
Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, 950-1250
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An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages.
Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.
Roger Ellis
The Medieval Translator
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These studies of the theory and practice of translation in the middle ages show a wide range of translational practices, on texts which range from anonymous Middle English romances and Biblical commentaries to the writings of Usk,Chaucer and Malory. Included among them is a paper on a hitherto unknown woman translator, Dame Eleanor Hull; a paper which compares a draft translation with its fair copy to show how its translator worked; a paper which shows how the mystic Rolle sought to "translate" his heightened spiritual experiences into words; and so on. In a medieval translation the general priority of meaning over form and style enabled, even obliged, the translator to act more like an author than like a scribe. Consequently, the study of medieval translation throws important light on contemporary, attitudes to, and understandings of, fundamental literary questions: for example, and most importantly, that of the role of the author.
Simon Townley
The Victoria History of the County of Oxford: Volume XX
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Unique multi-disciplinary study of a key part of the Oxfordshire Chilterns over a thousand years, based on intensive new research and exploring landscape, settlement, farming, and social and religious life.
Drawing on intensive new research, this volume covers a dozen ancient parishes straddling the south-west end of the Chiltern hills, set within a large southwards loop of the Thames close to Reading, Wallingford, and Henley-on-Thames. London, connected by river, road, and (later) rail, lies some 40 miles east. The uplands feature the dispersed settlement and wood-pasture typical of the Chilterns, contrasted with nucleated riverside villages such as Whitchurch and Goring. Caversham, formerly "a little hamlet at the bridge", developed from the 19th century into a densely settled suburb of Reading (across the river), while other recent changes have largely obliterated the ancient pattern of "strip" parishes stretching from the river into the hills, which bound vale and upland together and had its origins in 10th-century estate structures.
The economy was predominantly agricultural until the 20th century, with woodland playing a significant role alongside rural crafts and industry. Crowmarsh Gifford (near Wallingford) had an early market and fair. Gentrification and tourism gained momentum from the mid 19th century, accelerated by the arrival of the railway from 1840 and especially affecting riverside villages such as Goring and Shiplake, which saw extensive new building by wealthy incomers. Goring was earlier the site of an Augustinian nunnery and (probably) of a small pre-Conquest minster, while Mapledurham and several other places became foci for post-Reformation Roman Catholic recusancy, with Protestant Nonconformity expanding from the 19th century. Major buildings include mansion houses at Hardwick (in Whitchurch) and Mapledurham, alongside timber or brick vernacular structures and some striking modernist additions.
Sherry L. Reames
Saints' Legends in Medieval Sarum Breviaries
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Comprehensive catalogue of the hagiographical lessons in Sarum breviaries, with key studies of the most crucial elements.
Sarum Use was the most widely used form of the liturgy in late medieval England, but its service books were much less standardized than their modern counterparts. The lack of uniformity is particularly marked in Sarum breviaries' lessons on saints, which can vary enormously from copy to copy. This book is the first comprehensive examination of those lessons and the manuscripts that preserve them. It provides a catalogue of over 80 manuscripts and 12 early printed versions, giving a brief description of each one, sometimes correcting previous views of its date and provenance, and identifying each copy's divergences from the standard Sarum roster of saints. The book also identifies the textual families into which the manuscripts fall and the extent of their divergence from the lessons in both the early printed versions and the inadequate nineteenth-century edition on which modern scholars have previously depended. The author's findings offer an introduction to the unexpectedly rich variety of hagiographical lessons that survive, identify some of the sources behind them, and shed new light on the ways in which the Sarum breviary developed and was disseminated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Toshiyuki Takamiya, Derek Brewer
Aspects of Malory
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This volume of essays is aimed at advancing the appreciation of Malory, an author who has always been enjoyed by the common reader, but is still sometimes underestimated by the critics. Despite an increasing number of articles onMalory, there is a need for a general survey of recent research, which Aspects of Malory provides. The volume opens with a note by the late Professor Vinaver on Malory's prose, and three essays on Malory's Englishness andhis English sources, including an essay by P. J. C. Field which argues for an English rather than a French origin for the Tale of Gareth. This is followed by two essays on Malory's French sources, by Jill Mann and Mary Hynes-Berry. Terence McCarthy re-exasmines the sequence of the tales, and three further essays look at the scribal and textual tradition of Malory's work, in particular the relationship between the Winchester MS, Caxton's printed version, and the history of the MS. Finally, Richard R. Griffith reconsiders the authorship question, and proposes a long-forgotten Thomas Malory as the most likely candidate. There is a bibliography of recent research compiled byProfessor Takamiya. .`Full of sound scholarship'. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
B. A. Windeatt
Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues
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This volume makes available in translation the texts that lie behind Chaucer's dream poems - The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame and Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Chaucer's dream poems are now being increasingly studied and appreciated. With their attractively bookish dreamer figure and their graceful use of conventions and traditions, they have their distinctive place in Chaucer's work. But the nodernreader of these medieval poems particularly needs a sense of their literary context in the tradition of comparable narrative poems - largely in OId French - which Chaucer knew and drew upon. None of these French poems has ever been made available in English translation before, and many of the texts are difficult to access, being available only in dated French scholarly editions. The authors represented are Froissart, Machaut and Deschamps, as well as someminor and anonymous poems, and there are also relevant translations from Cicero and Boccaccio. The book gives an idea of what Chaucer's sources were in themselves, and in what ways the English poet was inspired to use and go beyond them, and this presents a picture of the poet at work. Some of the French poems are translated carefully by Chaucer, while with other poems he is selective, interested in certain sections of his sources only. In further cases, the original material can be seen to have provided a more general point of departure for Chaucer's own developments on his work.
David Wiles
The Early Plays of Robin Hood
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David Wiles argues that the prolific Robin Hood plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the Spring equivalent of the Christmas mumming tradition.
Robin Hood was the subject of many fifteenth and sixteenth century folk-plays, of which only traces remain. As a result, the ballads, many of which have survived, have usually been regarded as the main-spring of traditions about the famous outlaw. David Wiles however, argues that the dramatic tradition was equally, if not more, important. He sees the plays, associated with Whitsun revels, died out much earlier, and so must be reconstructed from fragmentaryscripts and the tantalising glimpses afforded by sources such as churchwardens' accounts. Robin Hood emerges as an emblem both of the Spring and of rebellion; as a Summer king, the player of Robin Hood flouted and parodied regular authority. With such a background, the plays ceased to be an acceptable part of parish life after the Reformation, and the games were suppressed, while the myth of Robin Hood was manipulated and made respectable.
Chris Humphrey
Time in the Medieval World
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A look at the competing notions of time in the middle ages, from the spiritual - death, the Last Judgement - to the practical - lawyers' calculations, clocks and calendars.
By exploring some of the more important senses of time which were in circulation in the medieval world, scholars from a wide range of disciplines trace competing definitions and modes of temporality in the middle ages, explainingtheir influence upon life and culture. The issues explored include anachronism as a feature in earlier senses of time, perceptions of death and of the Last Judgement, time in literary narratives and in music, constructions of timeas used in the professions, and original work on the particular systems and technologies which were used for the keeping of time, such as clocks and calendars.
Contributors: PAUL BRAND, PETER BURKE, MARY J. CARRUTHERS, DEBORAH DELIYANNIS, CHRISTOPHER HUMPHREY, ROBERT MARKUS, AD PUTTER, HOWARD WILLIAMS.
V.R. Bainbridge
A History of the County of Wiltshire
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Authoritative account of Cricklade and neighbouring towns, in an area immediately west of Swindon.
Cricklade, the Anglo-Saxon borough fortified by Alfred against the Danes, is the market town at the heart of this volume. As a notorious rotten borough, its corruption influenced the passing of the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. The town and the surrounding parishes described here are bordered by Gloucestershire to the north and Swindon to the East. They extend along the upper Thames valley and over the Wiltshire claylands to the limestone ridge in the south. The royal forest of Braydon covered much of the area in the middle ages and provided extensive grazing for livestock. Although disafforestation took place under Charles I, agricultural exploitation was limited by poor soils and parts were later returned to woodland or nature reserve. The settlements of traditional limestone buildings were remote until canal and rail transport increased trade in dairy products and the expansion of employment opportunities in Swindon resulted in their residential development, and an annexation of a small part of the area by the growing town.
Sarah Wood
Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition
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The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.
The fifty-plus surviving manuscripts of William Langland's Piers Plowman cast important light on the early public life of this central Middle English work, but they have been relatively neglected by scholarship. This first full study of the subject examines the textual variants, marginal rubrics and companion texts in the manuscripts. It illuminates a reception quite distinct from the reformist poems written by Langland's imitators in "the Piers Plowman tradition". It reveals how the earliest scribes devised various traditional forms of presentation that proved remarkably durable in the poem's subsequent reception, even surviving into the age of print. Exploring Piers Plowman's appearances in the manuscripts, paired unexpectedly with such genres as romance, hagiography and travel literature, the book demonstrates the surprisingly affective responses of medieval readers to the represented lives of the narrator Will and the title figure Piers the Plowman. At the same time, it shows that the evidence for individual scribal agendas in particular copies is more ambiguous than often assumed, with each book reflecting the activities of an unknown number of hands and an uncertain mixture of design and accident. By drawing on evidence from textual scholarship as well as codicological and literary approaches, the author offers fresh insight into Piers Plowman's place in literary history and proposes new ways of understanding the late medieval manuscript as a multi-layered, collaborative product.
Sarah Wood is Associate Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Warwick
Beverly Taylor, Elisabeth Brewer
Return of King Arthur British and American Arthurian Literature since 1800
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The revival of interest in Arthurian legend in the 19th century was a remarkable phenomenon, apparently at odds with the spirit of the age. Tennyson was widely criticised for his choice of a medieval topic; yet The Idylls of the Kingwere accepted as the national epic, and a flood of lesser works was inspired by them, on both sides of the Atlantic. Elisabeth Brewer and Beverly Taylor survey the course of Arthurian literature from 1800 to the presentday, and give an account of all the major English and American contributions. Some of the works are well-known, but there are also a host of names which will be new to most readers, and some surprises, such as J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur, rightly ignored as a text, but a piece oftheatrical history, for Sir Henry Irving played King Arthur, Ellen Terry was Guinevere, Arthur Sullivan wrote the music, and Burne-Jones designed the sets. The Arthurian works of the Pre-Raphaelites are discussed at length, as are the poemsof Edward Arlington Robinson, John Masefield and Charles Williams. Other writers have used the legends as part of a wider cultural consciousness: The Waste Land, David Jones's In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, and the echoes ofTristan and Iseult in Finnigan's Wake are discussed in this context. Novels on Arthurian themes are given their due place, from the satirical scenes of Thomas Love Peacock's The Misfortunes of Elphin and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court to T.H. White's serio-comic The Once and Future King and the many recent novelists who have turned away from the chivalric Arthur to depict him as a Dark Age ruler. The Return of King Arthurincludes a bibliography of British and American creative writing relating to the Arthurian legends from1800 to the present day.
A.R.J. Jurica
A History of the County of Gloucester
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Describes the area's varied agrarian history and industrial activity.
This volume of the county history covers the part of north-west Gloucestershire extending from the foothills of the Malverns in the north to the distinctive feature of May Hill in the south. Centred on the parish and former markettown of Newent, it also covers the ancient parishes of Bromesberrow, Dymock, Huntley, Kempley, Longhope, Oxenhall, Pauntley, Preston, and Taynton. Over much of the area a pattern of scattered farmsteads and small fields emerged from the clearance of ancient woodland. That process continued after the Norman Conquest but with the consolidation of farms from the later middle ages the story became one of the abandonment of numerous farmhouses and farmsteads. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries road improvements facilitated the growth of outlying villages and squatter settlement on common and waste land created a number of hamlets, as on May Hill and on the Herefordshire border at Gorsley. The volume also describes the area's varied agrarian history, from sheep, dairy and arable farming to its orchards, and, more recently, viniculture. Industrial activity has included glassworks and ironworks,and charcoal production. Newent, the chief trading centre from the thirteenth century on, saw both a short-lived coalfield, one of the principal objects for the construction of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire canal, and a spa.
Kelvin Everest
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Essays on Shelley's achievements and distinctive qualities as a writer covering the whole range of his work.
This volume brings together important new readings of Shelley's poetry by British critics. All of the contributors are aware of Shelley's controversial political views, and assume from the outset an engaged political consciousness which informs every part of his work. But the primary intention in this collection is to provide positive reassessment of Shelley's achievements and distinctive qualities as a writer. Included are detailed readings of the lyricpoetry, the longer visionary narratives, and also the topical literary-political works. There are informed discussions of the local social and cultural circumstances in which some of Shelley's best-known poems were written. In the poet's bi-centenary year, these readings are offered in a spirit of celebration and appreciation of a writer whose primary importance lies, not in his ideas, or his life, or his contexts, but in his status as a major Englishpoet.
Contributors: VINCENT NEWEY, KELVIN EVEREST, TIMOTHY WEBB, RICHARD CRONIN, EDWARD LARRISSY, BERNARD BEATTY, MICHAEL O'NEILL
Rosemary Morris
The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature
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Dr Morris examines how the legend grew through the retelling of what medieval writers believed was the story of an historical figure, based not on some lost Welsh biography, but on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings ofBritain, the `authorised' version of Arthur's career. She looks at his antecedents, the story of his conception and birth, and his accession, moving on to discuss his warfare, his role in peacetime, his relationships with hisfamily, his personal attributes, and his problematical death, showing how Arthur remains a distinct character in medieval literature despite appearing in an infinite variety of guises. Arthur appears in medieval literature in an infinite variety of different guises, yet remains a distinct character. Medieval writers, however freely they treat their sources, respected the traditions of the past, and Dr Morris, in writing the 'biography' of Arthur, isconcerned to show the complex intelinking of different versions of his story. Her approach is through the sequence of events which make up Arthur's career. She looks in turn at his antecedents, the story of his conception and birth, and his accession, the initial 'facts' and the discusses his warfare, his role in peacetime, his relationships with his family, and his personal attributes. The problems surrounding Arthur's death are examined in the finalchapter. Throughout the book, Dr Morris is concerned to 'use Arthur tro find out about the sources rather than vice versa' and in so doing illustrates both how medieval writers retold what they believe to be the story of a real historical figure and how the familiar story of Arthur gradually took shape over the centuries, based not on some lost Welsh biography, but on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain the 'authorised' version of Arthur's career for almost all medieval writers
Kari Anne Rand Schmidt
The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis
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Detailed examination of the evidence linking the authorship of the Equatorie of the Planetis with Chaucer.
The Equatorie of the Planetis, a Middle English text on the construction and use of a planetary equatorium, was composed in 1393. The unique manuscript, which appears to be the author's original, belongs to Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1952 it was brought to general attention by Derek Price who argued that the text was written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Whether the Equatorie is indeed Chaucer's has remained controversial ever since. Dr Rand Schmidt's book offers a detailed examination of the literary, linguistic and codicological evidence linking the authorship of the Equatorie with Chaucer. She analyses and compares the manuscript with other specimens proposed asChaucer's hand, and evaluates the available methods of testing. The volume includes a new transcription of the Equatorie, accompanied by a facsimile of the MS, and a KWIC-concordance to the text. Diplomatic transcriptions of three Middle English astronomical texts have also been included and are printed here for the first time.
Dr KARI ANNE RAND SCHMIDT is a language specialist, teaching in the Department of English at the University of Oslo.
Renee L. Curtis
Le Roman de Tristan en prose II
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Renée Curtis's three-volume critical edition of the Prose Tristanis the only edition of this very important medieval work ever published; until the first volume appeared in 1963, the work was only accessible in the form ofa few fragments which had been edited and a summary of the romance made by E. Lö
Calvin M. Bower
The Liber Ymnorum of Notker Balbulus
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First edition with the melodies of an immensely significant ninth-century liturgical masterpiece.
Winner of the Palisca Prize by the American Musicological Society, 2017
These two volumes present an important and distinctive collection of Carolingian poetry, composed for the liturgy in the last quarter of the ninth century by Notker Balbulus ("the stammerer"), monk of St Gall (d. 912). Notker was not the first liturgical composer inspired by the Carolingian renaissance of learning to make new texts for elaborate Alleluia melodies, but hewas certainly the first to raise the sequence genre to a consistently refined linguistic and theological level, and to provide a repertory for the annual cycle of holy feasts. His collection circulated widely in Germanic areas inthe tenth and eleventh centuries, while some of his compositions - such as Sancti spiritus - became staples throughout Europe. Notker's Liber ymnorum has never before been edited with the melodies after which his sequences were fashioned and to which they were sung. Provided here is a full edition of Notker's dedicatory preface, followed by 49 sequences. Each sequence is presented with two musical notations ("Carolingian", in neumes, and pitched on staves), followed by translations and an extensive commentary. A full introduction provides a context for the work.
J.H. Chandler
A History of the County of Gloucester
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Describes the area's varied agrarian history and industrial activity.
This volume provides authoritative accounts of thirteen ancient parishes alongside the River Severn near Gloucester or its tributary, the Leadon. Ten form a contiguous block north and west of Gloucester, extending from Upleadon toSandhurst; two more, Minsterworth and Elmore, lie on opposite banks of the Severn below Gloucester. The volume also includes Twyning, a parish near Tewkesbury bordering Worcestershire. It is a countryside of extensive meadows vulnerable to periodic flooding, of rich farmland between prominent, formerly wooded ridges, and of dispersed small settlements. Arable farming, which was widespread under its medieval monastic owners, eventually gave way to dairying, but cider and perry orchards, quarrying and fishing have also been important. River trade and settlement, and crossings by bridge and ferry, have influenced the area's economy and communications pattern, and its proximity to Gloucester attracted prominent citizens to build country houses and acquire estates there. Most parishes retain medieval work in their churches, and timber-framed domestic buildings are widespread. More recently, at Hartpury, the largest and most populous parish included in the volume, a large college campus has developed. .
John Jurica worked until his retirement in 2010 for the Gloucestershire VCH as assistant editor from 1973, and from 2007 as county editor: John Chandler, who had previously worked for the VCH project in Wiltshire and Herefordshire, was contracted in 2011 by the Gloucestershire County History Trust as editor to complete this volume and bring it topublication.
W. Mark Ormrod
Medieval Petitions
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New research into petitions and petitioning in the middle ages, illuminating aspects of contemporary law and justice.
The mechanics, politics and culture of petitioning in the middle ages are examined in this innovative collection. In addition to important and wide-ranging examinations of the ancient world and the medieval papacy, it focuses particularly on petitions to the English crown in the later middle ages, drawing on a major collection of documents made newly accessible to research in the National Archives. A series of studies explores the political contexts of petitioning, the broad geographical and social range of petitioners, and the fascinating "worm's-eye" view of medieval life that is uniquely offered by petitions themselves; and particular attention is given to the performative qualities of petitioning and its place in the culture of royal intercession. With their vivid new insights into judicial conventions and the legal creativity spawned by political crisis, these papers provide a closely integrated assessment of current scholarship and new research on these most fascinating and revealing of medieval social texts.
CONTRIBUTORS: W. MARK ORMROD, GWILYM DODD, SERENA CONNOLLY, BARBARA BOMBI, PATRICK ZUTSHI, PAUL BRAND, GUILHEM PEPIN, ANTHONY MUSSON, SIMON J. HARRIS, SHELAGH A. SNEDDON, DAVID CROOK
Chrétien de Troyes
Cligés
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Fully annotated edition, in French, of late 12c Arthurian romance.
Cligés is generally thought to be the second of Chrétien's Arthurian romances, probably written between 1185-87. This critical edition of Cligésis the first since Wendelin Foerster's in (1884) to take account of allthe manuscripts. Based on the Guiot manuscript, it contains many emendations, producing a text closer to that of Chrétien's original. Variant apparatus, notes, glossary, and editorial comment on the manuscripts accompany the text.
STEWART GREGORY is in the Department of French, Leicester University; the late CLAUDE LUTTRELL was formerly in the Department of English at the same university, and is known for his books and articles on 12c French Arthurian romance.
Cate Gunn
Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care
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New essays on the burgeoning of pastoral and devotional literature in medieval England.
Pastoral and devotional literature flourished throughout the middle ages, and its growth and transmutations form the focus of this collection. Ranging historically from the difficulties of localizing Anglo-Saxon pastoral texts tothe reading of women in late-medieval England, the individual essays survey its development and its transformation into the literature of vernacular spirituality. They offer both close examinations of particular manuscripts, and of individual texts, including an anonymous Speculum iuniroum, the Speculum religiosorum of Edmund of Abingdon and later vernacular compositions and translations, such as Handlyng Synne and Bonaventure's Lignum Vitae. The reading and devotional use of texts by women and solitaries is also considered. They therefore form an appropriate tribute to the work of Bella Millett, whose research has done so much to advance our knowledge of the field.
Contributors: Alexandra Barratt, Mishtooni Bose, Joseph Goering, Brian Golding, C. Annette Grise, Cate Gunn, Ralph Hanna, Bob Hasenfratz, Catherine Innes-Parker, E. A. Jones, Derek Pearsall, Elaine Treharne, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
James P Carley
Arthurian Literature XII
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Latest work on Arthur by respected scholars.
This is the first volume of Arthurian Literature to be edited by Professor Carley and Professor Riddy. It has a strong English flavour with papers on Malory, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Awntyrs off Arthure, Hardyng, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and court culture under Edward IV. The new editors introduce Notes, shorter explorations of topics currently under scrutiny by Arthurian scholars, and there will be updates of articles contained in previous volumes. Contributorsinclude: RICHARD BARBER, FELICITY RIDDY, BONNIE WHEELER, HELEN PHILLIPS, MARTIN SCHICHTMAN, LAURIE FINKE and N.M. DAVIS.
Richard Barber
Arthurian Literature III
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Patricia Malcolmson, Robert Malcolmson, Ann Stephenson
A Parson in Wartime
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A vivid picture of wartime Lincolnshire, and an engagingly readable account of the life of a busy parish priest.
Arthur Hopkins arrived in the Lincolnshire town of Boston in November 1942 to take up the post of Vicar of St Thomas's Church in the working-class parish of Skirbeck Quarter. He was already writing almost daily instalments of a diary for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. Generously conceived, it is written almost as if it were a series of letters to a friend abroad, providing descriptions and comments on everyday life in wartime. Little was beneath his notice. This was a man who had attended university with the King after the Great War and had prominent relations, but was also egalitarian in his leanings and sympathetic to the "common people". His is the diary ofa thoughtful and perceptive individual who had a realistic sense of himself, his society, and the fragility of life; the engagingly readable entries reveal fascinating details of wartime Lincolnshire and the life of a busy parishpriest. The diary is edited here with introduction and notes.
Patricia and Robert Malcolmson are social historians with a special interest in English diaries written between the 1930s and 1950s. They have edited for publication over a dozen of these diaries.
James L. Wimsatt
Chaucer and the Poems of `CH'
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Translation of fifteen lyrics marked "Ch" found in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, along with a detailed inventory of the contents and a study of English and Chaucerian connections. When Chaucer began his service inthe English courts in the late 1350s, the French lyric in the formes fixes of ballade, rondeau, virelay, and chant royal was the poetry of the court. Chaucer no doubt composed such poetry. Among extant anthologies of lyricsin the fixed forms from that time, University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, comprising 310 poems of which about half are anonymous, seems the most likely to contain works written by Chaucer. To add to the likelihood, fifteen of the best anonymous poems - ten ballades, four chants royaux, and a rondeau - have the intriguing initials "Ch" entered just beneath the rubrics. Besides editions and translations of the fifteen lyrics, Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch" provides a record of the numerous filiations of the Pennsylvania MS collection with Chaucer and England. This record includes text of a fascinating exchange of poems between Chaucer's early contemporaries, Philippe de Vitry and Jean de la Mote, the text of Granson's Cinq Balades Ensievans in the closest version extant to Chaucer's Complaint of Venus, and an analysis of the contents of the MS as they relate to Chaucer. Chaucerand the Poems of "Ch" concludes with a detailed inventory of this little-studied MS with particular note of Chaucerian aspects of it.
John B. Manterfield
Borough Government in Restoration Grantham
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The key theme of the Hall Book remains Borough Governance. The town's charters and rights were confirmed and extended in 1664 by the Charter of Charles II.
The key theme of the Hall Book remains Borough Governance. The town's charters and rights were confirmed and extended in 1664 by the Charter of Charles II. James II's Charter of 1685 led to the Alderman becoming Mayor, the First Twelve becoming Aldermen and the Second Twelve becoming Councillors. James also sought to extend his powers with more rights to interfere, as with other cities and boroughs across the country. The Quo Warranto issued in April 1688 and the removal of six Aldermen resulted in an un-sought for Charter later in 1688 but this may not have even been physically received in Grantham as the events of the Glorious Revolution intervened and governance was restored under the terms of the 1631 Charter of Charles I. The borough of Grantham was then governed in these terms until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. Subsidiary themes include the precautions against plague in 1665; the issue and recall of the town's half-pennies in 1667-1674; references to non-conformity in 1668-69 and the lives of some of the Corporation members.
Richard Barber
Arthurian Literature I
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`[The series] epitomises what is best in Arthurian scholarship today.' ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR ROMANISCHE PHILOLOGIE Since the first volume in 1982, edited by Richard Barber, Arthurian Literaturehas appeared annually. Its original purpose was to offer a forum for long scholarly articles on all aspects - literary, historic, and artistic - of the Arthurian legend in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, and bibliographical studies of all periods. Under new editors, whose first volume is Arthurian Literature 12 (1993), that original intention has been expanded to include shorter items of under 5000 words, along with the regular Updates to earlier volumes. All articles are refereed, and ArthurianLiterature has become the year-book of serious Arthurian scholarship. `An indispensable component of any historical or Arthurian library.'NOTES AND QUERIES
Nicholas Orme
A History of the County of Cornwall
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First survey of the religious history of Cornwall, from the county's Romano-British origins to the sixteenth century.
Highly Commended in Class 6 - Non-Fiction: History and Creative Arts of the Holyer an Gof Awards 2011.
Religious history is the focus of this volume, which covers the development of Christianity in the county from its Romano-British origins up to the Elizabethan Church Settlement of 1559; it provides the first ever in-depth study of the county's religious history during the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The story it tells is a highly distinctive one, full of interest, covering the uniquely numerous local saints and founders, their legends and the parish churches, chapels, holy wells and religious sites associated with them, as well as the larger religious communities. The Cornish clergy are placed in a national context and the impact of their scholarship on the wider word is emphasised.
Five general chapters are followed by detailed histories of the 35 monasteries, friaries, collegiate churches, and hospitals in the county. The book is well-illustrated throughout, with numerous maps, plans,and photographs.
NICHOLAS ORME is Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University and an honorary canon of Truro Cathedral. He has written some twenty books on English religious, cultural, and social history, including Medieval Children, Medieval Schools, and The Saints of Cornwall.
Neil Wright
Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I
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An admirable piece of work that will be welcomed by the many scholars who have long recognised the need for an easily accessible copy of the Historia. English Historical Review
An admirable piece of work that will be welcomed by the many scholars who have long recognised the need for an easily accessible copy of the Historia. English Historical Review
Geoffrey of Monmouth's HistoriaRegum Britannie was one of the most influential literary works of the 12th century. It offered a new and allegedly authoritative history of the British from their first colonisation of the island under Brutus until the late 7th century AD; hence its immediate and lasting popularity. The characters which the author introduced to a wider audience have become central figures in English literature, including the most spectacular of Geoffrey's reshapings, the figure of King Arthur. It is Geoffrey's account of Arthur which lies behind almost all subsequent Arthurian Romance. It is hardly surprising that no comprehensive edition of the Historia Regum Britannie as yet exists, because over two hundred manuscripts survive, many of which have never been thoroughly examined. In practical terms, this new edition, based on Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MSD. 568, will make this important text readily availableagain; all emendations to correct scribal errors are clearly indicated.
Sarah Rees Jones
Christians and Jews in Angevin England
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The shocking massacre of the Jews in York, 1190, is here re-examined in its historical context along with the circumstances and processes through which Christian and Jewish neighbours became enemies and victims.
The mass suicide and murder of the men, women and children of the Jewish community in York on 16 March 1190 is one of the most scarring events in the history of Anglo-Judaism, and an aspect of England's medieval past which is widely remembered around the world. However, the York massacre was in fact only one of a series of attacks on communities of Jews across England in 1189-90; they were violent expressions of wider new constructs of the nature of Christian and Jewish communities, and the targeted outcries of local townspeople, whose emerging urban politics were enmeshed within the swiftly developing structures of royal government. This new collection considers the massacreas central to the narrative of English and Jewish history around 1200. Its chapters broaden the contexts within which the narrative is usually considered and explore how a narrative of events in 1190 was built up, both at the timeand in following years. They also focus on two main strands: the role of narrative in shaping events and their subsequent perception; and the degree of convivencia between Jews and Christians and consideration of the circumstances and processes through which neighbours became enemies and victims.
Sarah Rees Jones is Senior Lecturer in History, Sethina Watson Lecturer, at the University of York.
Contributors: Sethina Watson, Sarah Rees Jones, Joe Hillaby, Nicholas Vincent, Alan Cooper, Robert C. Stacey, Paul Hyams, Robin R. Mundill, Thomas Roche, Eva de Visscher, Pinchas Roth, Ethan Zadoff, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Heather Blurton, Matthew Mesley, Carlee A.Bradbury, Hannah Johnson, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Anthony Bale
Jesse D. Billett
The Divine Office in Anglo-Saxon England, 597-c.1000
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First full-scale survey and examination of liturgical practice and its fundamental changes over four centuries.
At the heart of life in any medieval Christian religious community was the communal recitation of the daily "hours of prayer" or Divine Office. This book draws on narrative, conciliar, and manuscript sources to reconstruct the history of how the Divine Office was sung in Anglo-Saxon minster churches from the coming of the first Roman missionaries in 597 to the height of the "monastic revival" in the tenth century. Going beyond both the hagiographic "Benedictine" assumptions of older scholarship and the cautious agnosticism of more recent historians of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, the author demonstrates that the early Anglo-Saxon Church followed a non-Benedictine "Roman" monasticliturgical tradition. Despite Viking depredations and native laxity, this tradition survived, enriched through contact with varied Continental liturgies, into the tenth century. Only then did a few advanced monastic reformers conclude, based on their study of ninth-century Frankish reforms fully explained for the first time in this book, that English monks and nuns ought to follow the liturgical prescriptions of the Rule of St Benedict to the letter. Fragmentary manuscript survivals reveal how monastic leaders such as Dunstan and Æthelwold variously adapted the native English liturgical tradition - or replaced it - to implement this forgotten central plank of the "Benedictine Reform".
Jesse D. Billett is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Divinity, Trinity College, Toronto.
Gillian Cookson
A History of the County of Durham
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Tracing the history of Darlington from its beginnings as a small Anglo-Saxon settlement right up to the present, this volume marks the rebirth of the Victoria County History of Durham.
This latest volume in the Victoria Country History of Durham (the first for over eighty years) presents a study of the township of Darlington, part of the parish of the same name. It traces the history of Darlington from the earliest times: a small Anglo-Saxon settlement becoming a flourishing bishop's borough in the middle ages; its growth as an important staging post on the Great North Road during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the town'sprosperity during the nineteenth century, reinforced by its situation on the railway network. The story is taken up to the present time, with accounts of Darlington's social, political, topographical and economic history. The latter includes thorough accounts of major industries, including iron and engineering, leather, and the little-known but highly significant worsted and linen manufacturing industries. GILLIAN COOKSON is County Editor, VictoriaCounty History of Durham.
Richard Barber
Arthurian Literature VII
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Anne Wilson
Traditional Romance and Tale
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This stimulating and controversial book suggests an original approach to the study of traditional literature, focussing on medieval romance and on folktale [especially fairytale]. Although a number of new and striking interpretations of such stories are offered, the emphasis is on how they 'work' - how stories mean, rather than what individual stories mean. Dr Wilson observes that such stories have survived for many centuries, though they are conspicuously lacking in everyday logic. She argues that since the story-telling experience is one of re-creation and creation on the part of both story-teller and audience, and since the process of following the story demands imaginative identification of teller and audience with hero or heroine, then it is possible to examine the story from the protagonist's - and the audience's - own exploratory dream. Dr Wilson then discusses the magical and pictorial structures and processes of such stories. This is a literary study, relatively short, non-technical, highly condensed, richly suggestive. It concentrates on stories as artistic entities; psychological and psychoanalytical insights are subordinate to the literary aim. Although original, this book takes its place alongside much other work in related fields of literary, psychological, folklore, anthropological and sociological studies, which recognises the supreme imaginative significance of traditional stories and examines the multiple ways in which they convey meaning.
Zubin Mistry
Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900
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First full-length study of attitudes to abortion in the early medieval west.
When a Spanish monk struggled to find the right words to convey his unjust expulsion from a monastery in a desperate petition to a sixth-century king, he likened himself to an aborted fetus. Centuries later, a ninth-century queenfound herself accused of abortion in an altogether more fleshly sense. Abortion haunts the written record across the early middle ages. Yet, the centuries after the fall of Rome remain very much the "dark ages" in the broader history of abortion. This book, the first to treat the subject in this period, tells the story of how individuals and communities, ecclesiastical and secular authorities, construed abortion as a social and moral problem across anumber of post-Roman societies, including Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul, early Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian empire. It argues early medieval authors and readers actively deliberated on abortion and a cluster of related questions, and that church tradition on abortion was an evolving practice. It sheds light on the neglected variety of responses to abortion generated by different social and intellectual practices, including church discipline, dispute settlement and strategies of political legitimation, and brings the history of abortion into conversation with key questions about gender, sexuality, Christianization, penance and law. Ranging across abortion miracles in hagiography, polemical letters in which churchmen likened rivals to fetuses flung from the womb of the church and uncomfortable imaginings of resurrected fetuses in theological speculation, this volume also illuminates the complex cultural significance of abortion in early medieval societies.
Zubin Mistry is Lecturer in Early Medieval European History, University of Edinburgh.
Richard Barber
Arthurian Literature IV
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
W.A. Davenport
Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative
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`Lively and interesting... Complaint and its interaction with its narrative context is explored across the range of Chaucer's oeuvre from the shorter poems to various Tales.' NOTES & QUERIES
Counters the view of Chaucer's complaints as exercises in a worn-out French tradition by demonstrating how his effort to fuse lyric and narrative modes led him to experiment with complaint. `His analyses give new perspectives on several of Chaucer's works - an intelligent, original and profitable view.'STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER
Christopher Johnson, Stanley Jones
Steep, Strait and High
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Architectural and historical surveys of many of the most important buildings in Lincoln.
This volume illuminates the development of different building styles in timber, stone and brick over a period of 750 years, in one of the oldest areas of Lincoln. High quality and detailed architectural drawings are accompanied by documentary accounts which explain the historical context, and tell some of the fascinating and tragic stories of the people who lived and worked there from the mid-twelfth century until the First World War, including the medieval Jewish community. Steep Hill is already internationally regarded for the quality of its cultural environment as well as its picturesque architecture, and the Strait and the upper part of the long High Street have a wide range of different architectural styles in their buildings, of considerable interest. Steep, Strait and High forms the final volume in a series of architectural and historical surveys of the historic buildings of Lincoln, based on forty-five years of research, originally undertaken by the Survey of Ancient Houses, sponsored by the Lincoln Civic Trust, and now continued in the work of the Survey of Lincoln.
Christopher Johnson, Chair of theSurvey of Lincoln, was an archivist and latterly service manager at Lincolnshire Archives prior to becoming Information and Records Manager at Lincolnshire County Council; Stanley Jones was a lecturer at Sheffield College of Art,and has been deeply involved in the Survey of Ancient Houses in Lincoln.
