The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century
Until recently it was widely believed that feudal tenurial relationships sanctioned and facilitated the extra-economic exploitation of tenants by their lords. Together, the heaviness of rent charges and the arbitrariness of lordship discouraged and depressed tenant investment in agriculture.
Portuguese Crypto-Jewish Ballads: A Passagem do Mar Vermelho and A Pedra Mara
Some New Christians managed to escape abroad, founding Jewish communities in Bordeaux, London, Amsterdam, and other cities (Azevedo 359-430). With the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns (1580-1640), the number of those who moved to Spain and its American colonies was so great that the word “Portuguese” became practically synonymous with “Jew.”
Women, Suicide, and the Jury in Later Medieval England
Were medieval jurors more inclined to condemn female self‐killers to a suicide’s death because of the familiar figure of the mad, possessed woman?
Representations of Anglo-Saxon England in Children’s Literature
The way in which children’s authors have translated medieval history into their own “historicity” has changed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as popular and scholarly attitudes toward the Middle Ages have changed. Looking at these changes, my purpose in this thesis will be to answer two questions: why would children’s authors draw upon Anglo-Saxon England for their subject matter? And, what relevance does children’s literature have for an audience of medievalists?
“Alien” Encounters in the Maritime World of Medieval England
This essay explores these encounters, whether on English shores, on board ship, or abroad in foreign ports.
Church and nation: The discourse on authority in Ericus Olai’s Chronica regni Gothorum (c. 1471)
The Chronica regni Gothorum or Chronicle of the realm of the Goths is the first Swedish national history in Latin prose. It was completed after 1471 by a member of the Uppsala cathedral chapter, Ericus Olai, who, arguably, intended his work primarily for the readership of his own arch see. Ericus professed to compile a history of the Swedish realm from the birth of Christ until his own time and according to the succession of kings and bishops governing from Uppsala.
Between Herbals et alia: Intertextuality in Medieval English Herbals
The study points out the close relationship between medical recipes and recipe-like passages in herbals (recipe paraphrases). The examples of recipe paraphrases show that they may have been perceived as indirect instruction.
The Sovereign and His Counsellors : Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s-1570s
Muscovite understanding of how the autocratic ruler and his subjects should interact with each other was explicitly expressed in ritualised con- sultations between the sovereign and his counsellors. In my work, I endeavour to answer the question of how these consultations met the ide- ological needs of the autocracy and the requirements of the state adminis- tration.