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Is an innocent act behind a tragedy? Owen Archer investigates when a drowning in the River Ouse leads him on a chilling trail involving a boy's stolen scrip and a valuable golden cross. York, 1372. When river pilot Drogo stole young Hubert's scrip, Hubert's friends swore they would get it back. But their worthy endeavour is brought to an abrupt end when Drogo is viciously attacked and left to drown in the River Ouse. DEADLY SECRETS RISE TO THE SURFACE . . . Is Drogo's murder linked to the missing scrip? And where is Hubert? As the scrip is recovered and the river gives up a terrible secret, Owen becomes intrigued by a missing gold cross pendant Hubert carried in his scrip to remind him of hi...
As the articles reprinted in this volume demonstrate, medieval men and women were curious about the world around them. They wanted to hear about distant lands and the various peoples who inhabited them. Travellers' tales, factual such as that of Marco Polo, and fictional, such as Chaucer's famous pilgrimage, entertained audiences across Europe. Colorful mappaemundi placed in churches illustrated these other lands and peoples for those who could not read. Medieval travel literature was not only entertaining, however, it was also informative, generating proto-ethnological information about the world beyond Latin Christendom that provided useful guidance for those such as merchants and missiona...
First published in 2006, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE. This reference work provides a comprehensive understanding of many aspects of medieval women and gender, such as art, economics, law, literature, sexuality, politics, philosophy and religion, as well as the daily lives of ordinary women. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Additional up-to-date bibliographies have been included for the 2016 reprint. Written by renowned international scholars and easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be a valuable resource on women in Medieval Europe.
This book is about the ways that ordinary people in town and country creatively define themselves, their families and their social networks. It explores inheritance strategies, personal possessions, attitudes to commemoration after death, the daily fashioning of identity and the interactions between imagination and daily life.
The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical. The efflorescence of Ricardian poetry was not a direct result of this change, but it was everywhere shaped by it. This book characterizes this close connection between literacy training and literature, as it is manifest in the fine and ambitious poetry by Gower, Langland and Chaucer, at this transitional moment. This is also a book about the way medieval training in grammar (or gramma...
This volume is the first attempt to assess the impact of both humanism and Protestantism on the education offered to a wide range of adolescents in the hundreds of grammar schools operating in England between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. By placing that education in the context of Lutheran, Calvinist and Jesuit education abroad, it offers an overview of the uses to which Latin and Greek were put in English schools, and identifies the strategies devised by clergy and laity in England for coping with the tensions between classical studies and Protestant doctrine. It also offers a reassessment of the role of the 'godly' in English education, and demonstrates the many ways in which a c...
Contesting the argument that Restoration-period drama referred almost exclusively to domestic social and political issues, this text interrogates the extent to which seventeenth century heroic plays justify and perpetuate stereotypical representations of the Ottoman Turks in Western discourse. It provides a comprehensive account of representation of “the Other” based on difference. Joining historical discussions ranging from the Ottoman Empire’s rise as a world power to the development of British imperial ideology, the book asserts that dramatic texts and production provide a rich and unexamined archive in which the issues of representation, difference, and cultural stereotyping are at...
The first full-length examination of the medieval Charlemagne tradition in the literature and culture of medieval England, from the Chanson de Roland to Caxton. The Matter of France, the legendary history of Charlemagne, had a central but now largely unrecognised place in the multilingual culture of medieval England. From the early claim in the Chanson de Roland that Charlemagne held England as his personal domain, to the later proliferation of Middle English romances of Charlemagne, the materials are woven into the insular political and cultural imagination. However, unlike the wide range of continental French romances, the insular tradition concentrates on stories of a few heroic character...
The medieval landscape, as viewed through the eyes of scholars, was hardly populated by women. Particularly, young unmarried women or "maidens" have been paid little attention. This book aims to fill that gap by examining the meaning, experiences and voices of young womanhood. The life-phase of “adolescence” was different for maidens than for young men, and as such merits study in its own right. At the same time a study of young womanhood provides insights into ideals of feminine gender roles and identities at different social levels.
Nurture and Neglect: Childhood in Sixteenth-Century Northern England addresses a number of anomalies in the existing historiography surrounding the experience of children in urban and rural communities in sixteenth-century northern England. In contrast to much recent scholarship that has focused on affective parent-child relationships, this study directly engages with the question of what sixteenth-century society actually constituted as nurture and neglect. Whilst many modern historians consider affection and love essential for nurture, contemporary ideas of good nurture were consistently framed in terms designed to instil obedience and deference to authority in the child, with the best env...