How cutting off a horse’s tail was a big insult in the Middle Ages
Want to humiliate your adversary? Attacking his horse and cutting off its tail was the preferred method, according to a recent article.
Violence and Repression in Late Medieval Italy
Between the second half of the thirteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, central and northern Italian city-states frequently suffered moments of disruption of the social peace because of factional battles.
Warriors and warfare: ideal and reality in early insular texts
This thesis investigates several key aspects of warfare and its participants in the Viking Age insular world via a comparison of the image which warriors occupy in heroic literature to their concomitant depiction in sources which are primarily nonliterary in character, such as histories, annalistic records, and law codes.
Pruning Peasants: Private War and Maintaining the Lords’ Peace in Late Medieval Germany
‘Peasants are best when they grieve, and worst when they rejoice.’
Filicide in Medieval Narrative
These filicide episodes, regardless of origin, serve a dual purpose within their narratives, to captivate with gripping material and to educate through example. Patterns regarding victims and perpetrators transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries.
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…
Did Orderic Vitalis Have a Concept of Violence?
When Orderic writes that something happened violently, it was because he was expressing a judgment on whether or not this was a legitimate use of force.
Twilight Tours at the Tower of London!
A review of the Twilight Tour at the Tower of London!
How much did medieval teachers beat their students?
Medieval writing suggests classroom punishments such as beating, flogging and whipping were carefully regimented – and were only meant to be used to aid learning.
Crossing boundaries: women’s gossip, insults and violence in sixteenth-century France
Using evidence from cases recorded in the registers of the consistories of southern France, the author investigates the way in which Languedocian women policed each other’s behaviour, enforcing a collective morality through gossip, sexual insult and physical confrontation.
The Flowers of Chivalry Slay Goliath. Defining and Confronting Evil in the Early Crusader Sources
This paper considers the definitions of evil in the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century sources of the crusades.
Outlaws, women and violence: In the social margins of saga literature
In the society that the Icelandic family sagas depict, whose public sphere was ruled by men, violence was an extraordinary extent of action for women – but it takes place.
INTERVIEW: Author Tinney Sue Heath
In late July, I posted a book review on, “A Thing Done”, by Tinney Sue Heath. The book explores the fantastic world of Italian medieval vendetta during the thirteenth century. Here is my interview with this talented and accomplished author.
Bernard of Clairvaux’s Writings on Violence and the Sacred
A man sworn to earthly nonviolence, poverty and obedience, he was the product of a knightly family; he envisioned himself and his monastic brethren as spiritual soldiers on the front lines of a cosmic war. Bernard explored themes of spiritual and earthly violence throughout his many compositions…
The Protocol of Vengeance in Viking-age Scandinavia
Violence, even murder, perpetuated this cycle of revenge. This code of retribution can be broken down further into the following dimensions: the individuals involved, the appropriate actions as deemed by Viking society, and any extenuating circumstances, such as supernatural strength or the wronged party’s reluctance to seek revenge.
Taking (and Giving) Blows: Patterns of Violence and Spectacle in Le Mystère de Saint Martin (1496)
What I would like to do here is examine the passages of violence and other bits of scenography, moving from the macro to the micro level and back again, over the three- day play. With 260 rubrics (stage directions) embodied in the text, a manuscript nearly contemporaneous with the performance itself, we have a unique opportunity to visualize much of the action on stage.
Women on Trial: Piecing Together Women’s Intellectual Worlds from Courtroom Testimony
To tease out these issues, I would like to offer an analysis of a specific set of criminal records from the city of Toulouse in the later Middle Ages. In recent years, many scholars have attempted to gain access to the lives of women in medieval Languedoc.
Organized Collective Violence in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Tuscan Countryside: Some Case Studies from Central and North Eastern Tuscany
Violence is often thought of as a characteristic of all medieval societies. How such societies chose to exercise this violence is therefore a good, and understudied, way into understanding the basic rules about how they worked. Concentrating on twelfth and thirteenth century Tuscany, my intention is to show that a specific form of violence, namely organized collective violence, was not an option available to all social groups within the medieval rural society of northern Italy…
Murder, Mayhem and a very small Penis
On a Friday evening in the spring of 1375, William Cantilupe, a knight of the relatively young age of thirty and the great-great-nephew of St Thomas of Hereford, was murdered by members of his household.
Contextualizing Hildegard of Bingen’s Violent and Apocalyptic Imagery
This essay focuses on the graphic and violent language of Hildegard’s visions. I argue that Hildegard drew upon the political and ecclesiastical context in which she lived for her visionary experiences, rather than a fully developed form of salvation history.
Cheapside: commerce and commemoration
The broad street of Cheapside, Vanessa Harding shows, was a central location in the lives and minds of early modern Londoners. In a crowded city it was a significant open space where public events could be staged and important issues communicated to a wide audience. The everyday reality of shop and market trading — where qualities and values were scrutinized and false dealing punished – enhanced its association with truth and patency. Normally dominated by the authorities, it was on occasion captured by oppositional groups, though their activities tended to reinforce Cheapside’s identity as a place of publicity and validation.