Religion

An alternative view of the Conquest and settlement from north-east England, charting relations between the monastic community and the invading Normans.

North-east England experienced the Norman Conquest rather differently from the south of the country. This account of events in Northumbria gives an important alternative view of the Conquest and settlement, distinct from the moreusual southern and court-centred evidence. A key factor in events was the monastic community of St Cuthbert in Durham, which had survived the political upheavals following the collapse of the Northumbrian kingdom under Scandinavian pressure in the ninth century. Its position thus strengthened, it occupied an influential place in the factors ranged against the Normans, who recognised in the community a powerful force for resistance. The history of the community during the Anglo-Norman period is closely examined, particularly the relationship between the new Norman bishops and the monastic cathedral chapter and their respective rights and privileges. From this detailed study, Dr Airdargues that conquest, in the north-east at least, took a different, less traumatic form from that generally assumed from the early twelfth-century description of the reformation of the church in 1083. Throughout this account of events in Durham in the years following the conquest, Dr Aird is careful also to give due emphasis to relations with the Scots kings of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, and to the distinctive nature of medieval Northumbriaand the Haliwerfolc in particular, that region subject to the bishops of the Church.

Dr WILLIAM M. AIRD is Lecturer in History, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh.

Edition of ecclesiastical records from a parish church offer a rich source of knowledge for life at the time.

The documents in this volume bring to life the day-to-day business and upkeep of the large church of Mildenhall, belonging to a parish whose manor was the richest in the possession of Bury St Edmund's Abbey. The Collections recordthe weekly offerings gathered in aid of church building and maintenance. The churchwardens' accounts provide evidence for such matters as repairs to vestments and books, the cost of candles, and payments to the various tradesmenemployed. The later accounts also show the impact of the Reformation on the church, with the pulling down of the rood, destruction of the stone altar, and erasure of Thomas Becket's name from service books, and so forth. Many of the people in the accounts are also known from their wills, reproduced as an appendix.
The documents are set into context with an introduction, which covers the history of the church during the period, and notes.

The late Judith Middleton-Stewart gained her doctorate from the University of East Anglia; her book on death and remembrance in the Suffolk deanery of Dunwich, Inward Purity and Outward Splendour, is also published by Boydell.

The first book to give an account of the major pilgrimage traditions of all the great religions of the world.

Pilgrimage, the journey to a distant sacred goal, is found in all the great religions of the world. It is a journey both outwards to hallowed places and inwards to spiritual improvement; it can express penance for past evils, or the search for future good; the pilgrim may pursue spiritual ecstasy in the sacred sites of a particular faith, or seek a miracle through the medium of god or saint. Throughout the world, pilgrims move invisibly in huge numbers among the tourists of today, indistinguishable from them except in purpose. In England each year 000 pilgrims make the journey to Canterbury cathedral and the shrine of Thomas Becket; the great festival at Prayaga on the Ganges attracts over fifteen million men and women. This is the first book to offer a survey of the great pilgrimage traditions. It outlines the history of different customs and brings together some of the common themes, revealing in the process surprising similarities in practice among pilgrims of widely differing beliefs and times. RICHARD BARBER's interests range widely over the middle ages. He is the author of The Knight and Chivalry and the Penguin Guide to Medieval Europe;he has also written biographies of the Henry II and the Black Prince, and a history, The Pastons: A Family in the Wars of the Roses, as well as two classic Arthurian books, Arthurian Legends and King Arthur: Hero and Legend.Cover illustration: The scallop shell symbol of pilgrims to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela. This scallop shell, still showing simple colouring, was found inthe grave of a young man buried in Keynsham Abbey in the 12th century; the holes in the beak, for attaching the shell to the pilgrim's scrip, are clearly visible.

New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed.


Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination.

This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.