Chivalry and Public Disorder in Thirteenth-Century Florence
The was the second of two fabulous papers given at the my first session on Medieval violence. Whereas the first paper in this series looked at violence in the university setting, this one tackled violence in an elite sphere – Florentine knights and their retinues.
Student Violence at the University of Oxford
My first foray of KZOO 2013 couldn’t have been off to a better start with, “I just don’t want to die without a few scars”: Medieval Fight Clubs, Masculine Identity, and Public (Dis)order. There were only two papers in this session and both were riveting. I felt like I couldn’t type fast enough to get it all in! The first paper was given by Professor Andrew Larsen of Marquette University. Professor Larsen published a book on high and late medieval student violence and the Saint Scholastica’s Day Riot at Oxford university.
Human Monstrosity in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Beowulf and The Passion of St Christopher
The idea of a humanoid monster that can be reluctantly empathized with can be traced back to various source texts. For example, Grendel in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is a bloodthirsty savage, however upon a close reading of the poem he appears more human.
Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society
At some point early in 1355, the laborer Pons Gasin of Marseilles killed a woman named Alazais Borgona. The peace act that arose from this killing does not tell us why. What it does tell us is that the killing marked the birth of a great hatred between Alazais’s kinfolk and Pons.
“A Furore Normannorum, Libera Nos Domine!” A Short History of Going Berserk in Scandinavian Literature and Heavy Metal
The following essay aims to portray the history of the motif from Old Norse literature to its presence in today’s culture and particularly in heavy metal music. I aim to show how the motif is used to act as both a channel for aggression and as social criticism.
The Murder of St. Wistan
There is more than one ghost story connected with the quiet hamlet of Wistow, which lies off the London road about seven miles from Leicester.
The Ideology of the Feminine in Byzantine historical narrative: The role of John Skylitzes’ Synopsis of Histories
“Who once sliced men more sharoly than the sword Is victim of a woman…Epitaph for Emperor Nicephoros II Phocas.
The 727/1327 Silk Weavers’ Rebellion in Alexandria: Religious Xenophobia, Homophobia, or Economic Grievances
A brawl in the streets of 14th century Alexandria between Egyptians and Europeans – what caused it?
Perkin Warbeck: Whether my hero was or was not an impostor, he was believed to be the true man by his contemporaries
So what about the famous confession? By historians in the Tudor tradition this is usually seen as absolute proof that he was an impostor, arguing that “there is nothing in [his] confession which should make us doubt his truthfulness”. Somehow they cannot have looked at it too closely.
The Curious Career and Uncertain Past of Perkin Warbeck
Was Warbeck just another in a long line of pretenders to the throne of England, or did his appearance in Ireland in 1491 prove the innocence
of Richard III, whom most historians accuse of murdering his nephews, the Princes in the Tower?
Spectacularizing Justice in Late Medieval England
I use the word ritual because in cases of treachery use of a general ‘script’ as ordered by these two accounts emerges with surprising frequency in England in the late 13th and early 14th century.
Murder and Execution within the Political Sphere in Fifteenth Century Scandinavia
A quick glance at the regnal list of fifteenth-century Sweden shows that members of the nobility were at each others’ throats more or less all the time, especially from the 1430s and onwards.
Flemings in the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381
While the Peasants’ Revolt has been studied in depth by generations of medieval historians, the same cannot be said of England’s foreign-born inhabitants, and the largest group among these, the so-called Flemings (a term which was also applied to those from other principalities in the Low Countries besides Flanders).
SESSION III: The Medieval Experience of Siege
These are two papers from SESSION III: The Medieval Experience of Siege given at Boston College’s Haskin’s Conference. The first paper examined knightly interaction during sieges and the second paper delved into the actions of the besieged and besiegers during times of war.
Vikings were “first to begin criminal profiling”, historian says
The Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson tells the story of a tenth-century Viking warrior who took part in raids in Europe and often fought with his own neighbours in Iceland. When his life’s story was written in the thirteenth-century, was the author using him as an example of the type of man that society had to worry about?
Violence, Christianity, and the Anglo-Saxon charms
Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon charms comes from surviving magico-medical manuscripts as well as some liturgical manuscripts dated from the tenth to the twelfth centuries.
Kings, Peasants, and the Restless Dead: Decapitation in Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives
Decapitation is not a particularly common event, however notable, in the records of Anglo-Saxon history.
Of the Thief on the Cross: The Problem of Pain in Punishment
Legal and social historians assume that once a state structure became involved in the punishment of crimes, the aim of punishment was obviously deterrence. The spectacle of hanging or of broken bodies hoisted on the wheel served that end.
A Difference in Sixteenth-Century French Violence
This article considers the implications of both Catholic and Calvinist types of violence during the Reformation of mid-sixteenth-century France.
Gender and Violence in the Northern French Farce
I will briefly examine here the identity of farce’s violent characters and their victims, as well as the deviant behaviors punished by comically violent means, ending with a brief discussion of the social conditions which, in my opinion, may have caused the farce’s target audience to enjoy watching the aggressive correction of certain types of antisocial behavior in the century following the Hundred Years’ War.
Borderlands, Cross-Cultural Exchange and Revenge in the Medieval and Early Modern Balkans: Roots of Present Regional Conflicts or Merely a Historical Case-Study?
Acts of revenge could be carried out across generations, forcing the relatives of a slain individual to escape humiliation and shame by embarking on a never-ending journey of vengeance and retaliation.
í víking : Norse who went plundering
Raids were commonplace among the Norse. They outfitted ships, plundered towns and monasteries, and sought adventure. Although they pursued far more peaceful pursuits much of the time, the summers saw them go í víking, plundering.
The Court of Beast and Bough: Contesting the Medieval English Forest in the Early Robin Hood Ballads
The medieval English forest has long been a space of contested legal meanings. After King William I first created the 75,000-acre New Forest, the English monarchy sought to define the vert, both legally and ideologically, as a multiplicity of sites in which the king’s rights were vigorously enforced.
York’s Blackest Hour
The infamous Shabbos HaGadol massacre of the Jews of York in 1190 was the most notorious example of anti-Semitism in medieval England.