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The Knighting of Henry, son of William the Conqueror, in 1086
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of SESSION VIII: Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century, at the Haskins Conference at Boston College. -
“My trouthe for to holde—allas, allas!”: Dorigen and Honor in “The Franklin’s Tale”
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsWe can see from the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale that honor as pub- lic esteem is an overriding concern for Arveragus, who qualifies his exceedingly courtly marriage vow, swearing always to remain Dorigen’s servant in love, with the condition that he retain the public appearance of lordly husband, “That wolde he have for shame of his degree”. -
The Three Recensions of Eriugena’s Versio Dionysii
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsHowever, as G. Théry later discovered, Traube’s point of departure—the citations of Dionysius in Hincmar’s treatise on predestination—was faulty. Since Traube published his notes on the manuscripts of the Versio, Théry has proven that the citations in Hincmar’s Liber de praedestinatione come from Hilduin’s translation rather than that of Eriugena. -
‘In the Beginning’: The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis is a summary of the The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference by Rachel Scott. The conference was held on November 2nd at King's College London. -
Medieval Book History Week Lecture: “Practical Latin and Formal English in the 14th-15th Centuries”
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. -
Gesturing in the Early Universities
Posted on October 12, 2012 | No CommentsA notable feature of research into the early universities is that it usually pays close attention to the oral and literary traditions that underpinned scholastic education. By focusing exclusively upon these logocentric traditions, however, the significance of the word (whether written or spoken) in late medieval pedagogy has often been over- emphasized. In this essay I wish to correct this perspective by investigating the use of gestures in early university education as a non-verbal means of communication. -
Townscape as text: the topography of social interaction in Fethard, county Tipperary, AD 1300-1700
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No CommentsThe idea that complex social order in the past can be ‘read’ in the built environment, and indeed in material culture - tangible artefacts and landscape phenomena - in general, is a foundation of contemporary archaeology and historical geography. -
Re-writing discourse features: speech acts in Heliand
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsThough extremely fascinating and very appealing, the theory of the saxonization and northernization of the Gospel has ended up permeating every single level upon which an analysis of the poem can be carried out, becoming a sort of a priori starting point that may lead scholars to over-interpretation and, therefore, hinder them from developing a perhaps deeper insight into the poem. -
The Arthur of the chronicles
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsEven if we cannot accept the claim made by Geoffrey in his introduction that his putative source was ‘attractively composed to form a consecutive andorderly narrative’, he certainly made extensive use ofWelsh genealogies andking-lists. -
What is runology and where does it stand today?
Posted on August 29, 2012 | No CommentsRunes are an alphabetical system of writing, and for the most part they are used to record language. An independent runological discipline, if it is to be established, must therefore deal with the runic symbols themselves, individually and as systems, with their development, and their use to record language. -
Hellenism and the Shaping of the Byzantine Empire
Posted on August 27, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the role of Byzantine Hellenism on the art, literature, and society of the Empire has been the subject of tremendous study, the question of its origins has, nonetheless, rarely been raised, and the strongly Hellenic Byzantine identity seems, to a large extent, to have been taken for granted historiographically. -
The Riddle of Gollum: Was Tolkien Inspired by Old Norse Gold, the Jewish Golem, and the Christian Gospel?
Posted on August 23, 2012 | No CommentsI would like to speculate on Tolkien's sources for Gollum. As a start, it is likely that Tolkien's conscious sources for Gollum were the same as his sources for ents. -
Medieval Urban Literacy: Questions and Possibilities
Posted on August 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn the Middle Ages, in towns one seems to have had more chance of being confronted with writing than elsewhere. Certain urban milieus participating in written culture, however, have caught the scholars’ attention more than others. Studies of the urban communes of northern Italy have suggested a direct link between the reception of the written word in daily life and the emergence of literate mentalities. -
Hopkins and Early English Riddling: Solving The Windhover?
Posted on August 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn this article I will demonstrate that The Windhover has strong formal similarities with early English riddling. This genre, which has very little in common with modern riddles, has a range of distinctive formal conventions which, I argue, are also present in The Windhover, including an “entitled solution,” “kennings” and the use of formulae. -
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
Posted on July 24, 2012 | No CommentsMadness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society. -
The Norman Conquest and Anglo-Saxon literacy
Posted on July 23, 2012 | No CommentsMichael Clanchy, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the IHR, takes a fresh look at the effects of the Norman Conquest -
Runic Magic
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsA witty, not to say mischievous, Viking archaeologist has defined the first law of runic studies as ‘for every inscription there shall be as many interpretations as there are runologists studying it.’ -
Christian Cato: A Middle English Translation of the
Posted on July 17, 2012 | No CommentsMS Bodl. Add. A. 106 is a quarto volume of the fifteenth century, measuring 13.5 cms. x 20.5 cms. Six separate paper manuscripts are pre served together in the original fifteenth-century binding of leather over boards. The book is mainly a miscellaneous collection of medical and sci entific information, but it also contains the Quatrefoil of Love -
The Evolution Of English
Posted on July 13, 2012 | No CommentsA video lecture on the origin and vagaries of the English language up to the 15th century -
Sovereign Subjects, Feudal Law, and the Writing of History
Posted on July 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe early historiography of feudal law coalesced as the point of articulation for a discourse of time (the rejection/reclamation of a “barbaric” past) and a discourse of power (the theorization of the sovereign relation), and ultimately yielded a period concept foundational to “modern” theories of state. -
Religious Key Terms in Hellenism and Byzantium: Three Facets
Posted on July 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe following is a survey of the main semantic variations of love in the Greek and Latin of the Church Fathers and the medieval Latin of Scholasticism -
The Importance of Being English: A Look at French and Latin Loanwords in English
Posted on July 1, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay examines twenty six synonym pairs in English, looks at their etymology and briefly explains where they come from and how they work in a sentence. -
Changing views on Vikings
Posted on June 25, 2012 | No CommentsIn this article changing views, not only of Viking activities, but also of the etymology and meaning of the word viking will be discussed. -
Bogomils, Cathars, Lollards, and the High Social Position of Women During the Middle Ages
Posted on June 24, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the 12th century, if not slightly earlier, Western Europe lived through a period of economic and social upheavel termed by many historians the 12th c. Renaissance. One of its aspects is related to the considerable emancipation of women mostly in Southern France, a development which spread over to Italy, Flanders, and later, England. One can even detect social zones where real emancipation was axhieved. -
Placenames and the settlement pattern of dark-age Scotland
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsThis study will examine some placename evidence for features of settlement in E Scotland, that zone which lies of the Firth of Forth and E of the main Scottish mountain mass. In this areaat least four different languages have been spoken with differing temporal and spatial extents: one non-Indo-European tongue, Celtic, Norse and English.