Late Middle Ages Archive
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The Hundred Years Wars: Not One but Many
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsIn fact, the Hundred Years War was not fought only during the period 1337-1453, the most commonly given dates, nor was it fought only by England and France. -
Interpreting Warfare and Knighthood in Late Medieval France: Writers and Their Sources in the Reign of King Charles VI (1380-1422)
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsRomances provided the basis of a particular kind of view of knighthood and warfare that was very influential on other literature concerning knights and warfare, as much as it was on real life practices and attitudes. -
Elite and government in medieval Leiden
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe development of Leiden's 61ite is traced up to 1420. The siege of the city in that year and the assumption of power by Jan van Beieren resulted in important changes in the urban government: the faction of the Hoeken finally lost ascendancy and the viscount of Leiden ceased to have control over the city's administration. -
The vegetarian component of a late medieval diet
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsTrondheim was the seat of an archbishop and the centre of the see of Nidaros from 1152/53 until 1537 when the reformation reached Norway and the last Norwegian archbishop, Olav Engelbrektsson, fled the country. This marked a turning point in the town’s history. The arch- bishop’s residence, Erkebispegården, which was established around AD 1170 between the cathedral and the river Nidelva. -
Reality and Truth in Thomas of York: Study and Text
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe investigation is conducted through a study of opposites into which being is divided. These opposites are principally the one and the many, potency and act, truth and falsity. -
Myths and mandrakes
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsOthers, however, began to wonder whether the possession of roots might not bring them success in other areas as well—wealth, popularity, or the power to control their own and other people's destinies, and took to wearing them as good luck charms. -
“Morus per se?”: Pain and its Treatment in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-century Europe
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsYet of the many medical conditions that face human beings, pain is one of the most valuable to study from a sociocultural perspective. Pain can be methodologically difficult to study. At once reactions to pain are universal and yet the experience is fundamentally solitary and isolating. -
The Welsh Female Saint: Patterns within a Social Framework
Posted on March 2, 2013 | No CommentsHistoria Divae Monacellae, the Latin Life of Melangell is also comparatively late in composition, with the earliest manuscript being from the 16th century, but possibly drawing on earlier written sources.3 When we look at the availability of written texts relating to male saints the difference in source material is immediately evident. -
Animals on Trial
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe history of animals in the legal system sketched by Evans is rich and resonant; it provokes profound questions about the evolution of jurisprudential procedure, social and religious organization and notions of culpability and punishment, and funda-mental philosophical questions regarding the place of man within the natural order. -
Kings and Courtesans: A Study of the Pictorial Representation of French Royal Mistresses
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsAs France emerged from the Middle Ages, the monarchy began to establish itself as a more stable institution and a curious development took place: the French kings began to install official mistresses at court. With this official status these women became parallel members of the royal family. They lived like queens, with various estates granted to them by the kings. -
Scotland’s Pope: Benedict XIII
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsScotland’s Pope: Benedict XIII J. H. Baxter (Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University ofSt. Andrews) Scot’s Magazine (1929) Abstract In the latter half of the month of August,... -
Rome During Avignon: Myth, Memory, and Civic Identity in Fourteenth-Century Roman Politics
Posted on February 19, 2013 | No CommentsBroadly conceived, my dissertation examines the traditions of popular government emerging spasmodically in the roughly two hundred and fifty years between the Roman senate’s 1143 revival, and the papacy’s definitive 1377 return to Rome from roughly seven decades in Avignon. The majority of my inquiry, however, is directed toward the much-understudied fourteenth century. -
Historical Thought and the Reform Crisis of the Early Sixteenth Century
Posted on February 19, 2013 | No CommentsI shall follow what I feel to be the methodologically sound procedure of examining one case in some detail, while at the same time producing evidence to suggest that elements which are operative in this instance may be operative in others as well. What I should like to focus attention upon are certain ideas of history which were current in the early sixteenth century.  -
The Poisoned Image of the Borgias: A Look at the Public Image of Pope Alexander VI and His Children
Posted on February 18, 2013 | No CommentsUpon Rodrigo Borgia’s ascension to the papacy in 1492 and assumption of the name Alexander VI, the masses of Rome who watched his parade and celebration with hopeful eyes welcomed him eagerly, despite his wild ways and indiscretions as a cardinal. -
Strangers in Icelandic Society, 1100-1400
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe term ‘stranger’ (der Fremde) was defined by Georg Simmel (1858-1918) in a brief excursus (1908, 685–91). Scholars following in the footsteps of Simmel have distinguished at least two different types of stranger. One is the sojourner, who clings to the culture of his own ethnic group. The other is the immigrant, a newly-arrived outsider who has come to stay (see Siu 1952; Wood 1934, 43–44). The merchant Örn is close to the first type... -
The Mind’s Eye: Reconstructing the Historian’s Semantic Matrix Through Henry Knighton’s Account of the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe 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)... -
Sir John Fortescue and the French Polemical Treatises of the Hundred Years War
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsInevitably Fortescue had to adopt new arguments for the defence of Henry VI. To this end he asserted that the Lancastrians now had a just title through divine and ecclesiastical approbation, popular consent and prescription, but the core of his case was a direct response to the Yorkist claim that they had a superior hereditary title to the throne. -
Solem a Tergo Reliquit: The Troublesome Battle of Bosworth Field
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe first major point upon which we disagree concerns the nature of existing evidence about the Battle. Richardson points to a number of sources, but the central problem here is that, with one ex- ception, they are not contemporary with the Battle itself. -
Picturing Gregory: The Evolving Imagery of Canon Law
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper surveys images created for the opening of the Liber extra between around 1240 and 1350, from a variety of standpoints: iconography, page layout, patrons and readers - and also suggests possible ideological agendas that might be embedded in the illustrations. -
“Full Faith and Credit” in Merrie Olde England: New Insights for Marriage Conflicts Law from the Thirteenth Century
Posted on January 31, 2013 | No CommentsHere the subject is full faith and credit and the implications which the exposure of the myth of universality might carry for the recognition of judgments concerning marriage. As with the choice of law problem, so with the recognition of judgments, there is discovered in the anti- quities of English law a perception and comprehension exceeding our own. -
Reconstruction of the diet in a mediaeval monastic community from the coast of Belgium
Posted on January 31, 2013 | No CommentsThe aim of the present article is to report the results of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis on skeletons from a Belgian mediaeval population, and to look at variations in diet that may relate to age and social status. -
The Regular Canons and the Use of Food, c. 1200–1350
Posted on January 31, 2013 | No CommentsWe are greatly handicapped by the lack of material available to us for this period. By and large, household accounts which provide gross details of quotidian diet elude us. However, to recover the everyday diet of the canons, one useful approach is to examine corrodies and study the assumptions there, by way of analogy, with what can be inferred as normal consumption by canons. -
The Luffield Priory Grange at Monkbarn
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsThe lease of 1351 places Monksbarn in the manor of Pyre (West Perry or Paulerspury) so it might be expected that the site of the grange should lie within the parish of the same name. Despite mention of the wood within which the land lay, abutting landholding arrangements and the naming of a road along which the land must lie, there are few topographical details which can lead to a precise location for the grange. -
The Eternity of the World and Renaissance Historical Thought
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsMedieval and Renaissance controversies over the Aristotelian doctrine of “the eternity of the world” have hitherto been treated as disputes restricted to natural philosophers and theologians. -
En/gendering representations of childbirth in fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish devotional manuscripts
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsLate-medieval representationsof the births of holy and heroic children invariably show a domestic interior with the new mother lying in bed attended by female assistants.These images thus appearto show a `genderedspace' in which women cared for each other and from which men were marginalized.
