Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy
Margaret of York, sister to two kings of England, made one of the most brilliant marriages of her century.
Under Siege
So, how does one attack a walled city successfully?
The spider in the web: the weaving of a new, Lancastrian England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries
Examining the political maneuvering of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and his grandson, King Henry V, this thesis will show how the House of Lancaster wove the authority of both the temporal and spiritual realms into an inescapable web that enabled John of Gaunt’s direct descendents to secure their continuous position as heirs to the throne of England.
The Hunted Children of Kings: A Theme in the Old Icelandic Sagas
In this instance life appears to imitate art, that is if we categorize fairy tales as art. Life, or at least the life of King Sverrir, resembles a story about stepmothers.
Murder Will Out: Kingship, Kinship and Killing in Medieval Scotland
In fifteenth-century France and England, however, murder became more general, encompassing premeditated killing just as nowadays. Scottish fifteenth-century legislation shows a similar blurring, but in the opposite direction…
The role of women in medieval Andalusian Arabic story-telling
Our aim in this paper is to collect anecdotes about women whose existence is well established in history, and to determine why they have been considered worth mentioning in literary or historical works.
Brewing, Politics and Society in an Early Modern German Town – a case study of Görlitz in Upper Lusatia
In the Middle Ages, the Upper-Lusatian town of Görlitz – today situated on Germany’s Eastern periphery close to the Polish border – was at the heart of a wider European trading network.
A Climate for Crusades? Weather, climate and armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land (11th–14th Century)
The crusaders found themselves confronted not only with foreign cultures and violent armed resistance, but also with an alien natural environment and climatic conditions that could prove to be sometimes just as fatal as the arrows of the enemy.
Crisis of Legitimacy: Honorius, Galla Placidia, and the Struggles for Control of the Western Roman Empire, 405-425 C.E.
This dissertation offers a new analytical narrative of the years from 405 to 425 C.E., a period which extends from the final phase of the general Stilicho’s control over the administration of the emperor Honorius
Saint Lucy’s Day: A Light in a Dark Time
Scandinavian and Sicilian girls eagerly await the arrival of Saint Lucy on 13 December.
Janos Hunyadi: Preventing the Ottomans from Conquering Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century
By using his experiences gained in the condottiere wars in Italy and in the Hussite Wars in Bohemia, he was able to defend the Hungarian borders, and successfully attacked the Turks on their territory
Antimicrobial assays of three native British plants used in Anglo-Saxon medicine for wound healing formulations in 10th century England
Three important Anglo-Saxon medical texts from the 10th century contain herbal formulations for over 250 plant species, many of which have yet to be evaluated for their phytochemical and/or pharmacological properties.
The Zaccaria Deal: Contracts and options to fund a Genoese shipment of alum to Bruges in 1298
This paper analyses one of the most fascinating late medieval commercial contracts. Some have advanced that it is was the first ever written maritime insurance.
Art on the edge: hair and hands in Renaissance Italy
This paper argues that items designed for the bodily extremities such as hair-coverings, hats, fans and other accessories were valued for the ease with which they could be changed and adapted to express a range of different meanings: political, social and individual.
Imagination For Better Not Worse: The Hobbit in the primary classroom
The story of The Hobbit can be utilised to develop the concept of the Hero’s Journey, a persistent trope in oral and recorded literature and an archetype for virtually all human experience.
The Story of James V, King of Scotland
James’ rule was to be dominated in foreign policy by shifting alliances between Scotland and France, England, the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. At home, his kingdom was fractured.
Tolkien’s The Hobbit: Bilbo’s Quest for Identity and Maturity
Notwithstanding the fact that The Hobbit was generally relegated to children literature, its individual layers should be scrutinised more profoundly because it may help the understanding of the human psyche.
Depicting the Medieval Alchemical Cosmos: George Ripley’s Wheel of Inferior Astronomy
Alchemical writing often develops the idea of a physical or analogical correspondence between heaven and earth: a relationship most fre- quently and conveniently expressed by the use of the seven planetary symbols (Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) to denote the seven metals (usually gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin and lead respectively).
Learning by doing or expert knowledge? Technological innovations in dike-building in coastal Flanders (13th-18th centuries AD)
Dike construction apparently uses simple technology, with slow and gradual change; not the kind of technology that reshaped the material conditions of living, comparable to the spread of electricity or sanitation in the 19th century ‘networked’ city (and linked to the disciplining of society and the rise of domesticity and the modern self-reflexive individual) (often inspired by Latour and Foucault).
Sylvia Plath’s Use of Dantean Structure
Many people have remarked on the genius of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. However, it has come to my attention that Plath has been grossly misunderstood by her critics, such as the famous critic, Harold Bloom who left Plath out of his book The Western Canon.
Doing a PhD in Middle-earth
In this paper, I show how The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien can be viewed as an extended allegory for any challenging and arduous human endeavour, and in particular for tackling and completing a PhD.
The Black Death, Economic and Social Change and the Great Rising of 1381 in Hertfordshire
What drove medieval people to such desperation that they felt they had no other course of action other than revolt? Was this a spontaneous reaction to a perceived injustice or a desperate response to years of simmering resentment?
Scottish Monastic Life
The first thing one has to remember is that most of these visible symbols are the symbols of the very last period of monasticism in Scotland. Monasteries in Scotland were peculiarly likely to suffer the ravages of siege and fire. If they lay on the borders or along the main routes from England into Scotland, they fell victim to the periodic invasion of the English.
St. Ninian of Whithorn
My interest here is in finding usable information regarding the centuries before Bede and in the way in which new data, especially the outstanding recent archaeological discoveries at Whithom in Wigtownshire (which is certainly the site of Candida Casal. might support and add to his picture of St. Ninian and the importance of his church at Candida Casa.