Mapping the urbanization of Medieval England

Biogeographies: Transcending anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene

Reviewed by: Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader and: Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook Mathew Kuefler Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader. Edited by Jacqueline Murray . [Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures, 7.] (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview. 2001. Pp. xiv, 524. $29.95 paperback.) Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook. Edited by Conor McCarthy . (New York: Routledge. 2004. Pp. xii, 292. $24.95 paperback.) Two sourcebooks with very similar titles have appeared in the last few years. The first is part of a Broadview Press series of thematic medieval sourcebooks. The second is part of Routledge's growing number of history sourcebooks. Both Murray's and McCarthy's additions to these lists would be useful in medieval history courses on the related subjects, or in more general courses on the [End Page 743] history of sexuality. Nonetheless, the two books approach their subjects in curiously different ways. Murray's book is organized thematically. She begins with a chapter on "Foundations and Influences," providing examples of the biblical, Roman, and Germanic antecedents to the Middle Ages. Her next chapter, "Love and Its Dangers," notes the various medieval debates about the emotion. The third chapter, "Marriage and the Church," reviews theological writings and ecclesiastical regulations, followed by a fourth, "Marriage Ceremonies, Rituals, and Customs," that includes liturgies and legends specifically on weddings. Her fifth and sixth chapters, "Husbands and Wives" and "Marriage and Family," relate the vicissitudes of that relationship, as ideals and realities, respectively. The seventh, "Childbirth," compares religious and medical writings on that subject, and the eighth, "Parents and Children," continues with ideals and realities of the lives of children. The ninth and last chapter, "Beyond Christendom," samples Jewish and Muslim writings from medieval Europe, as an explicit contrast with what has come before. Within each chapter, sources are organized chronologically. McCarthy's book is also organized both thematically (as parts) and chronologically (as chapters). He begins with "Ecclesiastical Sources," including chapters on "The Church Fathers," "Anglo-Saxon England," "Theology and Canon Law," and "Canon Law and Actual Practice." His part two, "Legal Sources," contains chapters on Anglo-Saxon and Norman law. The title of part three, "Letters, Chronicles, Biography, Conduct Books," indicates its various chapters, although "Saints' Lives and Female Religious Writings" takes the place of biography. Part four, "Literary Sources," divides its chapters according to Old English, Latin, Old French, and Middle English literatures. Part five, finally, "Medical Sources," consists of two chapters, one on women's health and the other on love. Two things should be immediately apparent. First is that Murray has organized her book according to topics, while McCarthy has used genres to structure his book. The advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are clear. Murray's groupings allow her to bring together and contrast ecclesiastical and medical authorities on childbirth, for example, noting their different concerns. McCarthy's organization, in contrast, allows him to show the changing interests and emphases of patristic, early medieval, and canonists' writings on sex and marriage. The second major difference between the two is their geographical range. Murray's book includes sources from Iceland to Egypt, while McCarthy's restricts his to writings from England or that circulated there, although he admits that he adds some outside examples "to illustrate an aspect of medieval life for which I know of no English source" (p. 23), such as the record of a hermaphrodite from Colmar and glosses on the Viaticum of Constantine the African on lovesickness. The advantages of Murray's decision over that of McCarthy's will be clear to readers from outside of England. She writes: "During the Middle Ages, western Europe was a remarkably homogeneous culture. Despite regional [End Page 744] identities, a myriad of jurisdictions, shifting boundaries, and internal political tensions, Europe nevertheless was Christendom, united by religion and distinct from non-Christians" (p. 469). McCarthy's decision is a bit more difficult to defend. He writes: "There is no such place as 'medieval England,' politically or geographically speaking.... Nor is there any such place as 'medieval England' linguistically speaking" (p. 23). Yet he offers no compelling reason to counterbalance...

Ringkøbing in the Middle Ages The last 25 years have seen frequent archaeological excavations in the medieval market town of Ringkøbing. In this paper, the author presents the results and weighs them against the written and cartographic sources in order to gain an overall picture of the emergence and development of the town during the Middle Ages (Fig. 1). Over the years, several local historians have dealt with the history of Ringkøbing. They based their investigations exclusively on the few medieval sources referring to the town, however, and the main issues they concentrated on were the reason for the town being situated exactly there, the origin of its name, its age, and whether it had grown out of an earlier settlement or had been a planned construction. In the first known reference to Ringkøbing, the town is called “rennumkøpingh,” or “the town at Rindum” (Fig. 2). Rindum, or “rennum,” was the rural parish, which had transferred some of its land to the town. A town prospect from around 1677 depicts the small town as seen from the north, with ships anchored on the fjord (Fig. 3). It gives a good impression of the number of streets and their directions. Nevertheless, the first reliable survey of the market town is from the early 19th century (Fig. 4).Ringkøbing is situated on the northern coast of Ringkøbing Fjord, on the edge of a moraine hill, well protected against floods. From the early days, Ringkøbing’s existence was inextricably linked with the navigation conditions on the fjord. Geologists have pointed out that during the Middle Ages the present islands in the tidal area south of Blåvandshuk continued further north, to Bovbjerg. This row of islands is visible on a chart from the mid-16th century (Fig. 5). On the chart, one of the islands is called “Numit,” which is interpreted as “Nyminde,” or “the new mouth.” Huge floods during the 17th century started a major process of drifting of material from the north along the coast, and the channels between the islands sanded up. Just one channel remained navigable, but it moved southward and eventually closed up completely (Fig. 6), which was a disastrous development for Ringkøbing. Nevertheless, during the Middle Ages, ships could still pass unhindered from the sea into the fjord and to Ringkøbing, where they could trade and take in supplies and water.Ringkøbing is situated in an area which has been inhabited since the last Ice Age, and which was especially rich during the Iron Age. By the mid-13th century the area was divided into districts and parishes, and the market town sprouted up in the middle of a well functioning agricultural region. The first actual excavation took place in Ringkøbing in 1978, when the property of Vester Strandgade 14 was investigated by Ringkøbing Museum. An area measuring 44 square metres was examined, and the excavation revealed part of the medieval town (Fig. 7). At the bottom of the excavated area, several furrows observed in a 15 to 20-cm thick humus layer indicated that the area had been farmed right up until the beginning of the activities there in the medieval period. Of the two ditches registered in the area, the earlier one had been dug into the ploughed field, whereas the later ditch was situated approximately in the middle of the medieval culture layer (Fig. 8). Twenty-three post-holes were found, but unfortunately their relationships to each other could not be determined. An extensive layer with a 3.4-metre diameter turned out to be the remains of a well, the shaft of which had been built from granite boulders (Fig. 9). A small bronze buckle was found at the bottom of the well (Fig. 10), and several sherds of imported pottery from around 1300 were found in the filling around the well shaft.The layer sequence was visible in the walls, with the yellow-brown moraine gravel at the bottom, then the above-mentioned humus layer with furrows, and then the homogeneous, grey, medieval culture layer. Above this an earthen floor from the 17th century was visible in several places. The upper layer, with a thickness of c.60 cm, was modern.The medieval layer contained large amounts of pottery sherds, mainly from locally produced grey-brown globular vessels. The rim sherds were from two main pottery types, A and B. Type A, which constitutes the largest group, has the classical, almost S-shaped rim (Fig. 12), whereas type B is characterized by an outward-folded edge creating a flat inner rim (Fig. 13). Both types exist concurrently throughout the medieval culture layer.The glazed pottery sherds represent two types, locally produced earthenware (Fig. 14), and imported pottery. Both types were present in the Vester Strandgade excavation. Of the imported sherds, 39 are from green-glazed jugs with a “raspberry” decoration (Fig. 15). These jugs were produced in the Netherlands around 1300. Sherds from German stoneware found in the medieval layer date from the same time (Fig. 16).The Vester Strandgade excavation was followed by several large and small investigations in the town centre (Fig. 17). “Dyekjærs Have” contained several traces of medieval structures, for instance a large number of post-holes, some of which were from a small building. The pottery material was abundant and consisted mainly of sherds from greyish-brown globular vessels (Fig. 18), but there were also sherds from imported and locally manufactured jugs. Other important town excavations include that of Marens Maw’, where the numerous traces of medieval structure included a row of post-holes interpreted as the outer wall of a house, and the excavation of Øster Strandgade 4, which revealed a late medieval turf-built well (Fig. 19). The excavation of Bojsens Gård also gave interesting results. It was very close to the street, and in this area the medieval culture layer had a depth of up to 60 cm. A ditch dug into the ploughed medieval field represented the earliest activity on this spot. Several structural traces reflected a continuous settlement going back to the early days of the town. Here, too, sherds from globular vessels dominated, but glazed ceramics and stoneware were also represented. The written sources from the Middle Ages reveal nothing about the medieval appearance of the town. The archaeological excavations, on the other hand, have shown that the settlement consisted of houses made from posts dug into the ground, probably half-timbered constructions with wattle-and-daub outer walls, earthen floors, and thatched roofs. The archaeological excavations have also revealed that Ringkøbing sprang up on a ploughed field during the second half of the 13th century. There are no signs of any settlement prior to this, and it is most likely that the town was laid out all at once according to a fixed town plan. No building traces were found in the streets, on Torvet (the market square), on Kirkepladsen (the church square), or on Havnepladsen (the harbour square), and so these squares must have been planned as such from the beginning. The numerous grooves and ditches are interpreted as boundary markers made when the plots were first established. The earliest ones are dug into the ploughed field, and so they must indicate the very first land-registration of the town.In order to found the new market town, an oblong part of Rindum parish had to be confiscated, and the town was marked out in the western part of this as an area measuring approximately 550 by 250 metres (Fig. 20). The streets were laid out in the still existing regular network. There was no harbour, and the ships would anchor in the shallow water off the town. Goods were transported by barge or horse-drawn carriage.In the town centre the market square was laid out, and behind it the square by the church. Ringkøbing’s church is a small Gothic brick building from around 1400. The townsmen probably used the parish church in Rindum during the first 150 years.At the time when Ringkøbing was founded, the Crown was establishing several small coastal towns throughout the kingdom. There was a notable lack of towns along the west coast of Jutland, and the founding of Ringkøbing probably represents a wish to fill this vacuum. At the same time, it was a friendly gesture directed towards the merchants from Northwest Europe whose large merchant ships sailed along the west coast on their way to and from the major markets in the Baltic. It was in the king’s interest to control the trade in the country, as it enabled him to levy taxes and to oppose the Hanseatic League’s attempt to monopolise foreign trade.Life in medieval Ringkøbing was based on trade and crafts, and the king controlled both through his assignment of privileges. The first preserved trade licence concerning medieval Ringkøbing is from 1443, but that document is in fact a confirmation of a privilege previously granted.The archaeological excavations and the written sources have informed us that the town’s trade interests lay across the North Sea. The town’s own merchants travelled overseas, and foreign merchants passed through. Foreign goods such as glazed jugs, stoneware jugs, and woollen cloth were imported from the Netherlands, Flanders, and Germany. The sources also indicate that a hinterland reaching far into Jutland used Ringkøbing for disembarkation. After the Middle Ages, the sources describe Ringkøbing as a small town, at times rather poor, which often had to ask permission to postpone the tax payments for which it was liable. The earliest depictions and maps also give the impression of a small town taking up less space than it did during the Middle Ages (Fig. 21).It will be interesting to learn whether future excavations in Ringkøbing will radically change the picture of the town presented here.Helle HenningsenRingkøbing Museum Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

To the best of our knowledge, the only mention of Trnovo, now part of Ilirska Bistrica, as a market town is contained in the rent-roll of the local parish from 1713. The article examines the background of what for now appears to be the sole reference to the status of the settlement. The central question is: How long and on what basis was the place, which otherwise served as the parish seat, considered a market town? The comparison to other late-documented market towns in Slovenian territory excludes the possibility that the title of market town had deeper roots, reaching as far back as the Middle Ages. There is every indication that the perception of Trnovo as a market town was influenced by several factors, including the very important provincial estates’ tollhouse. The market town was also associated with the nominal office of (market-town) judge, combined with that of village head for Bistrica and Trnovo. The title of market town was most probably gradually introduced in the seventeenth century, and it very likely never attained wider recognition and visibility.

The contribution discusses the development of Vače, one of the smallest Slovenian market towns, from its beginnings to the mid-nineteenth century. The place first appeared in written sources at a relatively late stage (1429), and its main feature was that, unlike most Slovenian market towns, it did not develop as a suburban settlement below the castle as the seigniorial seat but a bit further away, around the vicariate and later parish church. Of the four market towns in Upper Carniola, Vače was the only »classical« market town, meaning that it emerged in the Middle Ages, exercised the standard economic functions of market-town settlements, and enjoyed a full administrative-judicial autonomy. Due to the specific structure of the sources preserved, much more is known about the normative aspect of the market town’s internal structure than about the practical implementation of its self-administration and the lower judiciary. In terms of economy, Vače functioned as a typical small market town with well-established trade fairs and craftsmen, whose basic craft services catered to the needs of the local population.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

Food and diet are central to understanding daily life in the middle ages. In the last two decades, the potential for the study of diet in medieval England has changed markedly: historians have addressed sources in new ways; material from a wide range of sites has been processed by zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists; and scientific techniques, newly applied to the medieval period, are opening up possibilities for understanding the cumulative effects of diet on the skeleton. In a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject, this volume, written by leading experts in different fields, unites analysis of the historical, archaeological, and scientific record to provide an up-to-date synthesis. The volume covers the whole of the middle ages from the early Saxon period up to c.1540, and while the focus is on England wider European developments are not ignored. The first aim of the book is to establish how much more is now known about patterns of diet, nutrition, and the use of food in display and social competition; its second is to promote interchange between the methodological approaches of historians and archaeologists. The text brings together much original research, marrying historical and archaeological approaches with analysis from a range of archaeological disciplines, including archaeobotany, archaeozoology, osteoarchaeology, and isotopic studies.

The study Population and habitat on the feudal domain Siria at the beginning of the XVIth century” is based on a statistical document developed in 1525. We have many and very important information on the people’s one of the largest feudal domain in Transylvania in the middle Ages. The 8152 inhabitants, where nearly 90% for them is represented by serfs, live in 121 villages scattered over an area large enough in the old county of Zarand. The predominantly landform is mountain. The majority of the 121 villages, 76% more accurate, have up to 80`s inhabitants, so they are relative small villages. Yet some localities are also somewhat larger – market towns - which have between 184 and 460 inhabitants. Finally, we can see that the old type of habitat is preserved up to the present day with few changes and 70 villages from them exist in our days on the territory of the counties Arad and Hunedoara.

AT a meeting of the Society for the Study of Inebriety and Drug Addiction on July 11, a paper on alcoholism in medieval England was read by Dr. J. D. Rolleston, who said that the chief sources of information concerning the prevalence of alcoholism in the Middle Ages were lay writers, especially poets, historians and ecclesiastics, whereas little was to be gleaned from contemporary medical works. In the Middle Ages, distilled liquors were unknown as a convivial beverage and alcoholism was due mainly to indulgence in ale and to a less extent in wine. Inebriety was widely spread in all classes of society, but predominated among the clergy, in spite of the protests of leading ecclesiastics such as Anselm, Bede, Boniface, Dunstan and Wycliffe, and among the university students. The medieval publican had a bad reputation for fraud and dishonesty, while the tavern was often regarded as a place of ill-repute. Alcoholism during the Middle Ages in England, as elsewhere, resembled in many ways the alcoholism of classical antiquity, which Dr. Rolleston discussed in a previous paper before the Society (see NATURE, Oct. 23, 1926, p. 601). Legislation dealing with drunkenness or control of the liquor trade was practically unknown in the ancient world, whereas taxation of drink, reduction in the hours of sale and the number of taverns and other restrictions were introduced in the Middle Ages. The absence of syphilis in both ages was noteworthy in view of the fact that alcohol was such a frequent incentive to exposure to infection and was liable to aggravate the disease when once it was acquired.

Short Notices 235 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Short Notices Coss, Peter and Maurice Keen, eds, Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2002; cloth; pp. x, 278; RRP £45/US$75; ISBN 0851158501. This interesting collection brings together a range of studies of visual representation in medieval England. Given its focus on secular culture, chivalric display, especially heraldry, naturally looms large. Crouch and Coss use the evidence of heraldry to make important points about family structures – ‘no decisive move towards agnatic lineage’ (36) – and class formation – the failure of knighthood ‘to become the basis of a caste nobility’ (67) – between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, while Ailes provides a very useful review of the political uses of heraldry ‘as symbolic statements of political intent’ (87) in the later middle ages. In more sharply focused studies Shenton details the lengths to which Edward III took his identification with the leopard in the royal arms, while Pilbrow documents the manner in which the ceremonies of the Order of the Bath provided opportunities for ‘chivalrous bonding’ among the governing class. The papers by Gittos and Gittos on effigies and by Saul on brasses are also largely concerned, though not exclusively, with the armigerous classes. Gittos and Gittos show that gentry families facing extinction in the male line were especially driven to create memorials to their lineage and name. Saul uses his vast expertise to provide a wide-ranging survey of brasses, issues of supply and demand, and the concern to elicit prayers as well as commemorate and mark social distinction. Several papers extend the social range. Lachaud considers evidence for dress regulation prior to the sumptuary law of 1337 and asks, somewhat inconclusively, whether the legislation reflected increasing status consciousness or greater access to luxury goods. Barron provides an interesting exposition of the way in which the merchants and artisans of London developed their own distinctive cultures of display in the shadow of the royal court. Campbell discusses the curious range of items – from fine silver plate to relics and memorabilia – left to Oxford and Cambridge colleges by their founders and early benefactors. How often have we heard that medieval culture was still a largely visual culture? This collection certainly demonstrates the importance of visual representation and display in late medieval England, and the value of visual 236 Short Notices Parergon 21.1 (2004) sources in informing rather than simply illustrating larger political, social and cultural developments. What is especially striking about the essays is their freshness and range. Lachaud and Saul, for example, raise interesting points with respect to the manner in which supply may have run ahead of demand. Keen’s introduction is a gem, rich in insight and illuminating perspective. He raises the important question of how far the growth of literacy in this period, far from ‘downgrading the importance of ceremony and of the visual in culture generally’, actually served ‘to extend the range, the potential and the capacity for elaboration of the visual in culture through interplay with the written word’ (4). John Watts’s concluding chapter likewise draws attention to the lack of visibility the English state – the public rather than the private face of the monarchy – in the later middle ages. The book includes a number of choice illustrations, but it prompts the reader to look again at the surviving images of the age, especially perhaps in the catalogues of the exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum, namely J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 (1987) and R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic: Art for England 14001547 (2003). Michael Bennett University of Tasmania Debby, Nirit B.-A., Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) and Bernadino da Siena (13801444 ) (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 4), Turnhout, Brepols, 2001; hardback; pp. xiv, 344; RRP EUR65.00; ISBN 2503511635. A lot has been written on Renaissance Florence. Dominici and Bernardino have each given rise to a body of literature, both historic and recent, and sermon studies are a recognised area with its own conference groups and journals. Nirit Debby takes...

III The Central Middle Ages (900–1200)

Becoming English: Ronwenne’s Wassail, Language, and National Identity in the Middle English Prose Brut Margaret Lamont Ronewenne, þat was Engistes douʒter, come wiþ a coupe of golde in here honde, and knelede bifore þe kyng, and saide to him “Whatsaile!” and þe kyng wist nouʒt what it was forto mene, ne what he shulde ansuere, for-asmiche as himself ne none of his Britons ʒitte couþe none Englisshe speke, ne vnderstonde it, but speken þo þat same langage þat Britons ʒitte done. . . . and þat was þe ferst tyme þat “whatsaile” and “drynkehaile” come vp into þis lande; and fram þat tyme into this tyme it Haþ bene wel vsede. [Ronwenne, who was Hengist’s daughter, came with a cup of gold in her hand, and knelt before the king, and said to him, “wassail!” And the king did not know what it meant, nor what he should answer, because neither he nor any of his Britons could speak any English yet, nor understand it, but they spoke the same language that Britons [i.e. the Welsh] still do. . . . And that was the first time that “wassail” and “drink hail” [End Page 283] came into this land, and from that time unto this time it has been well used.]1 The Middle English prose Brut, the most widely circulating vernacular history of Britain in the Middle Ages, consistently presents England as a unified nation, one that arises out of the multiplicity of peoples in medieval Britain. This marks a departure from both its earlier sources and many of the histories contemporary with it, which present, instead, conflicting ethnic and regional identities within Britain. Recent scholarship has focused so heavily upon this counternational, regional tradition that it is easy to forget that there was also a strong current of “nationalistic” British historiography. I want to focus on this current here, with special emphasis on the prose Brut’s presentation of the Saxon2 arrival in Britain and on the figure of Ronwenne in particular. To speak of the English nation and English national identity in the medieval period is controversial. For the majority of scholars today, the nation is a strictly modern phenomenon, rising in concert with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism and dependent on these—the trappings of modernity—for its existence. These scholars argue that competing regional, religious, and familial identities posed a continual challenge to any unified national identity in the Middle Ages. In addition, there has been much recent work that rethinks the practice of studying the whole of medieval Britain rather than examining each region separately.3 Yet [End Page 284] there were discourses in medieval Britain that attempted to imagine the island of Britain as a single political and cultural entity. Responding to the presence of terms and ideas suggestive of the nation in the literature of the past, an increasing number of scholars within medieval studies have questioned the most dominant narrative of the origin of the nation and proposed the existence of medieval national identities.4 In my approach to nationhood and national identity in the later European Middle Ages, I take my cue from Bernard Guenée’s cogent summation: Did national consciousness exist in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages? That is an open question and badly phrased. It would be better to say: what did a European understand by “nation” at the end of the Middle Ages? In which State did the inhabitants see themselves as part of a nation? How intense was this “national” consciousness and what was it like? What vigour and cohesion did the State derive from this “national” sentiment?5 That medieval nations were different from our own modern ones—which themselves vary widely—is clear; but it is equally clear that there was some sense of what it meant to be English in the late medieval period. The modernist bias fails to account for a work like the Middle English prose Brut, with its persistent engagement with questions of cultural and ethnic identity, with nationhood both political and ideological, and, most importantly, with how to create a single, defining history of England that incorporates, nonetheless, its repeated colonization and ethnic...

Reviewed by: Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 by Bronach C. Kane Katie Barclay Kane, Bronach C., Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 (Gender in the Middle Ages, 13), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 309; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781783273522. How do we remember? In Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England, Bronach Kane explores how memory is deployed by lower-status people in church court testimony, particularly attending to memory as an embodied, material practice. As the gender in the title suggests, this book considers how men and women remembered the past differently from each other, but its achievement is much more significant than this might suggest. In writing a history of how ordinary people remember, we learn of memory as not just a process of thought but as bound up with and emerging through the body, environments, and everyday life. Memory studies is a huge area of research, but attention to memory practices amongst medieval and early modern people has been a more modest endeavour. Popular Memory can be situated alongside works such as Andy Wood’s The Memory of the People that move from memory as an exploration of what is retained and forgotten and its relationship to power and nation-building, to memory as something of the everyday and the local. [End Page 218] Popular Memory is a substantial book, with seven chapters, and a scholarly introduction and conclusion. It begins with a discussion of how canon law, the legal context of the evidentiary base of the volume, understood and acknowledged memory as a form of legal proof and the (limited) role it allowed for women in providing legal testimony. The remainder of the book explores the different ways that memory was presented within the courts by witnesses to legal cases and how it was given authoritative force. Ranging across themes of sexuality and sex, gendered and especially reproductive bodies, birth, marriage, and death, written memory and orality, and finally place and landscape, Popular Memory highlights how the legal evidence—accounts of things seen, thought, felt—were articulated through the mundane and embodied experiences of everyday life. The birth of a child or a wedding became ways to assuredly affirm the dating of a particular event; courts recognized these social facts as memorable for the individual and so they could become anchors that other pieces of evidence could be tied to and made legally compelling. Similarly, descriptions of place and landscape or material items gave weight to testimony, offering explanations as to why certain types of information were known and retained. In doing so, memory was made authoritative through being embedded in the personal and, in particular, in the rhythms of family life and labour. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that memory was a gendered practice. The lives of men and women, their experiences of sex, reproduction, marriage, work, and property use, were shaped by gender, and so the contours of their testimony, and capacity to speak authoritatively in particular areas, reflected these gendered experiences. As Popular Memory suggests, this was not entirely transparent. Men were not only allowed to speak to a wider range of topics and types of legal case, but had greater literacy levels, enabling them to use writing more readily to affirm their memory practices, and were generally considered more reliable witnesses. At times, this allowed their memories to be given greater weight than those of a wife or similar female family member, even in cases where women might have been thought to have more reliable memory experiences (such as a husband countering his wife’s dating of childbirth). Yet, as this book shows, if patriarchal norms gave broad shape to the operation of the law, testimony and the gendered experience of memory also offered opportunities to contest, resist, and negotiate power structures. Personal stories, recounted through embodied histories, offered a type of agency for the lower orders. This overview does not do justice to this book. What makes it a rich and fascinating contribution to the field is not just the larger...

Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender. Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, it illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.

Reviewed by: Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England by D. Vance Smith Julie Orlemanski D. Vance Smith. Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. x, 299. $30.00 paper. Dying is bound up with the nature of literary art. This is the guiding insight of D. Vance Smith’s luminous new study Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England. As Smith explores, the representation of death is consistently unsettled, circular, interminable—because “when it seems to appear, its absence of being calls into question the means by which it is supposedly represented” (14). Interminability is at the heart of how Arts of Dying defines literature as well, as a discourse that “is never definitive, never arrives at a unified meaning that can be transposed to some other, more useful, register” (5). Both the language of dying and the language of literature, then, “point toward a messianic moment at which they do not arrive” (5). Incapable of reaching the terminus that lies beyond language’s aesthetic and referential resources, they are nonetheless directed toward the limit—and so help us “discover something about our experience of finitude” (4). The reciprocity between interminability and finitude emerges across twelve chapters’ worth of finely wrought readings, of texts that span the late tenth to the fifteenth century. The readings gain depth [End Page 346] from Smith’s marshaling of medieval philosophy and theology, as well as the work of modern thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot. By means of “imagination, style, and form,” Smith argues, “this literature justifies itself as a language that can say the unsayable” (14). Arts of Dying is a beautiful book, almost vibrating with the intensity of its thinking. The introduction and first chapter together orient readers within the project as a whole. There, Smith distinguishes what his topic is not: it is not the afterlife nor theological accounts of death, “which provide answers for a finitude we have not yet fully experienced” (4). Instead, the book pursues “accounts of dying, not death, because strictly speaking what we talk about when we talk about death is really dying,” or the suspended state of mortal life approaching death (4–5). Certainties about the terminus of this suspended state are hard to come by. To explain why, Smith recapitulates two long-standing problems in medieval logic. One is how properly to name someone who has died and thus, strictly speaking, ceased to exist: “The question of how to refer to someone who was dead became, in the later Middle Ages, one of the central problems in theories of reference” (21). The other problem is how to describe the duration of dying, or “what, or when, dying is” (23). Both of these problems extend far back into the history of philosophy but reemerged in early fourteenth-century Oxford, where terminist logic and quantitative kinematics provided new ways of thinking about change, limit, and language. The “slippage between termination and term,” or “the trace of death in language,” turns out to be a concern that philosophy shares with medieval vernacular texts (24, 26). At a couple of points in Arts of Dying, Smith argues for the direct influence of academic logic on Middle English poetry (as in the reading of Pearl in Chapter 8). For the most part, though, the representational aporias of dying index the common existential and discursive situation that philosophy and poetry share, one likewise addressed, as Smith shows, by Heidegger, Blanchot, G. W. F. Hegel, Edward Said, and Gillian Rose, among others. The driving claims of Arts of Dying are more theoretical and literary-critical than historical. This helps explain why Smith has relatively little to say in his introduction about how Arts of Dying fits alongside previous monographs in Middle English studies. For instance, readers may be surprised not to see more engagement with Amy Appleford’s important Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (2015), which tracks how the genre [End Page 347] of ars moriendi played a crucial role in the civic culture of late medieval London. But Arts of Dying is a work of criticism more than it...