Where the Middle Ages Begin
This essay examines the use of forced hair cutting in the late fourteenth‐century alliterative romance, Morte Arthure, to show how it is used to develop characters that reflect the tension surrounding the English king Richard II and the tyranny that characterized the final years of his reign.
Mark King is a PhD student in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge working on the political history of Richard II’s reign.
Its narrative of cross-dressing, male prostitution, gay sex, clerical promiscuity and the like seems to offer a rare window onto late medieval sexuality and sexual mores.
On 30 September 1399, Richard II’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, would usurp the throne, taking the name Henry IV, and months after the coronation, Richard would die a prisoner in Pontefract Castle amidst speculation that he was murdered.
I thought I’d take five minutes today to talk a little bit about one of England’s forgotten kings.
The kings of medieval England, besides using history for the entertainment of themselves and their courts, turned it to practical purposes. They plundered history-books for precedents and other evidences to justify their claims and acts. They also recognised its value as propaganda, to bolster up their positions at home and strengthen their hands abroad.
The article focuses on the representation of deviant sexual behavior in 14th-century English poetry and other chronicles. The portrayal of King of England Richard II as a rebellious youth, which is interpreted as perverse and lacking manliness, and the propaganda needed to offset this perception are discussed. Historical information is given about the political culture and power of the church. The murder of Edward II after being accused of sodomy by the Bishop of Hereford is mentioned.
In the following discussion, I will explore some hitherto unexamined links between the Confessio Amantis and one of these legal texts, the Nova Statuta Angliae or New Statutes of England, which circulated among professional and non-professional readers in the 1380s and 1390s and which Richard II received in a manuscript now in Cambridge: St. John’s College MS A.7.
During the Middle Ages, aristocratic banquets were common and often grandiose affairs. The function of a banquet went beyond mere celebration of an event or holiday and became a tool for demonstrating a person’s wealth, influence, piety, and generosity.
It has become commonplace in modern textbooks to base any brief account of the Hundred Years War on the contention that the chief cause was the dynastic dispute over the French throne between Edward III and Philip of Valois.
Henry travelled extensively, became famed throughout Christendom as a champion jouster, crusaded in Eastern Europe, and looked after his father’s holdings whilst John of Gaunt campaigned in Spain.3 It is impossible not to note that Henry Bolingbroke’s popularity continued to increase while Richard II’s declined.
Fashion of Middle England and its Image in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Petra Štěpánková Bachelor Thesis, Masaryk University – Brno, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, Brno (2012) Abstract This thesis deals with the main features of fashion in medieval England and focuses particularly on the second half of the fourteenth century. It […]
The Mind’s Eye: Reconstructing the Historian’s Semantic Matrix Through Henry Knighton’s Account of the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381 Sarah Marilyn Steeves Keeshan Master of Arts, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia December (2011) Abstract The medieval historian engaged with the systems of power and authority that surrounded him. In his account of the Peasants’ Revolt in late medieval […]
Were medieval kings like other men? A century’s work on the sacrality of kingship has tended to stress how kings differed from their fellow adult males, even fellow nobles.
The name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil.
This thesis will examine the manner in which Shakespeare drew upon existing sources material to depict a king whose inherent character flaws made him unworthy of his crown.
This article complements historical and textual analyses of Creton’s book by examining the visual narrative in Harl. MS. 1319, the only one of the seven surviving manuscripts of the text to be illustrated with a pictorial cycle of sixteen images.
The way these operate can be seen in the section of La Male Regle from which I excerpted my paper’s title. It comes about three-quarters of the way through the poem when the narrator relates a first-hand account of how he and his Privy-Seal Office colleagues handle a night of drinking.
What were the causes and circumstances that led not only to the ebullient revolt in Southeast Europe, but also to ist relative success?
The theoretical framework for my analysis of Richard II’s use of iconic signs was largely drawn from the works of Charles Peirce, Umberto Eco, and the studies of the iconography of kingship by Louis Marin.
The two funerals and two bodies of King Richard II : a study on the idea of kingship, transference of power and political theology Jovanovic, Kosana MA Thesis in Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, May (2009) Abstract England was a turbulent place at the time when King Richard II was in power (1377-1399). This thesis addresses […]
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