Medieval English Research Articles

Gifts and Rewards: Exploring the Expenditure of Late Medieval English Queens

ABSTRACT Understanding queenly expenditure is a key part of studying queenship, not least because it provides insight into how queens carried out their roles and responsibilities. But examining such expenditure also serves a purpose in relation to research on the material foundations of queenship. This article examines one aspect of that expenditure, namely the gifts and rewards given by Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth of York, two fifteenth-century English queens consort. Gifts and rewards serve as signal examples of how these queens used their economic resources and provide an additional entry into how to view these queens in economic and social/cultural terms. It shows that relating the queens’ gifts and rewards to and demonstrating the implications of their practices on both their economic and social roles is a fruitful method of extending our understanding of the economic resources available to the queens and how they used them. This article is part of a research cluster in this issue on the economic power of medieval queens.

Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature, by Anna McKay, D.S. Brewer, 2024, pp. 328, £95.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84384-713-7.

This study presents a book review of Anna McKay's ‘Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature’.

Addressing new aspects of surveillance in late mediaeval England, 1350-1550

The paper addresses new aspects of surveillance in late medieval England. New approaches to the study of the phenomenon are introduced, while a limited study puts some of the author’s suggestions to the test. The study addresses the modus operandi of political and labour surveillance focusing on late medieval English towns. Surveillance was intensified after the Black Death. Institutional and noninstitutional surveillance were part of everyday life, but they were also used by the ruling elites to consolidate their power. Surveillance was endured by the lower social ranks. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that sometimes popular classes resisted surveillance or even used it to their own advantage.

Touching the Franks Casket: Global History and the Trojan Past on an Early Medieval English Object

Abstract The contribution examines the Franks Casket, a whale-bone casket probably produced in the northern British kingdom of Northumbria in the eighth century that displays a number of carved images referencing events from different cultural and temporal contexts as well as inscriptions in Roman script and runes, Latin and Old English. We focus on the casket’s lid, which shows a siege scene, with an archer prominently displayed towards the middle, the word ægili carved above him. Traditionally understood as a reference to an unknown story about Weland’s brother Egil, the image has also been read as a depiction of the siege of Troy by a minority of scholars. While we offer evidence that the latter reading is at least somewhat better founded than the former, we argue that the lid’s design does not necessarily invite a straightforward identification with a single cultural context but rather works as a hinge that ties together the various cultural and temporal references on the casket. In allowing the viewer to construct various contexts in which the image might be viewed, the Franks Casket suggests their fundamental compatibility, as if the supposedly distinct historical and legendary materials had always overlapped and permeated each other. Taking into account the object’s material and aesthetic form thus makes it possible to break away from all-too-simple narratives of historical succession and helps us understand the complex temporalities that early medieval English art was capable of generating.

The Boundaries of Popular Control in Late Medieval English Towns

Abstract Scholarship on pre-modern popular politics often focuses on speech, identifying the ways in which people outside the elite could have a “voice” in government. Using examples from late medieval English towns, this article argues for the existence of a particular kind of popular politics that centered on seeing and hearing rather than speaking. This type of politics—labeled “popular control”—concerned the right of the urban political community at large to observe rituals of governance and to audit financial accounts. Through these acts of collective witnessing, lesser citizens and non-citizens exerted an indirect political power to restrict leaders’ freedom of action and to ensure that their performance of office abided by set rules. The unusually detailed Hall Rolls and Hall Books produced by the civic government of Lynn in 1412–13 and 1418–25 illustrate that “popular control,” far from being a vehicle for increasing the urban commons’ “voice” in municipal decision-making, often stood in opposition to principles of elected representation. After 1418, more people were being admitted to the inner sanctum of virtuous individuals deemed capable of offering rational counsel to mayors and jurats, but there were fewer opportunities for the wider public to witness performances of governance by this expanded group of decision-makers. The crux of debate in fifteenth-century English towns—and, perhaps, in the tumultuous world of late medieval Europe more generally—was often less about who should exercise political influence and more about how popular political power could be exercised most appropriately and effectively.

The Concept of Political Rights of an Individual under the Law of Medieval English Cities in the 11th to the 14th Century

The Concept of Political Rights of an Individual under the Law of Medieval English Cities in the 11th to the 14th Century

Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship, by Kimberly Fonzo

<i>Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship</i>, by Kimberly Fonzo

:Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

:<i>Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms</i>

The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University: The Works of Thomas Chaundler, by Thomas Meacham

<i>The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University: The Works of Thomas Chaundler</i>, by Thomas Meacham

From Christmas Candlesticks to Deathbeds: The Material Culture of the Male ‘Middling Sort’ in Late Medieval English Wills

ABSTRACT This article analyses how men of the rural ‘middling sort’ in late medieval England used movable goods to perform their status and gender by applying relational approaches from material culture studies to bequests in their wills and testaments. It is based on analysis of 403 wills produced by husbandmen, yeomen and gentlemen from Norfolk and Suffolk, c. 1425–1538. Ranking between the gentry and peasantry, these men were major landholders, administrators and consumers in the English countryside, but their mentalities and wills have received little attention. Wills provide evidence for how rural men interpreted their belongings in life and how they imagined objects could help them prolong their patriarchal authority after death. By focusing on three moments when wills intervened in the lifecycles of things – commodity exchange, gift-giving and animation – this analysis models the relational interpretation of medieval material culture and reveals how objects helped create male, middling-status identities.

What’s in a Name? Tracing the Origins of Alfred’s ‘the Great’

Abstract King Alfred (r. 871–99) is the only native-born English ruler to have gained the byname ‘the Great’. This was not a contemporary sobriquet, but is often considered to have been bestowed in the Elizabethan era by Reformation scholars who increasingly cast Alfred in the role of the founder of the English nation. The acknowledged exception is a reference to Alfred as Rex Alfredus magnus (King Alfred the Great) in a marginal annotation in Matthew Paris’s early thirteenth-century text, Deeds of the Abbots of St Albans Monastery. This medieval attestation of Alfred’s sobriquet is, however, less isolated than has been previously thought. Drawing on a variety of medieval English and Old Norse-Icelandic texts, this article identifies twenty-five examples of Alfred being called ‘the Great’, twenty-three of which have previously gone unremarked. In so doing, it argues for a widespread tradition of Alfred as ‘the Great’, the first sole ruler of all England, from at least the thirteenth century.

The Impact of the Magna Carta on Medieval English Politics

This research examines the influence of the Magna Carta during the reign of King John, a time characterized by his authoritarian governance and fiscal requisitions. The study examines the impact of the Magna Carta, which arose from the rebellion of the barons against King John. It altered the balance of power by questioning the notion of the divine right of kings and laying the groundwork for the establishment of parliamentary systems and legal changes. The study emphasizes the Magna Cartas significance as not just a legal instrument, but also as a catalyst for change in English political history. The Magna Carta championed individual liberties and laid the foundation for a system of government where representatives are elected and the principle of legal governance is upheld. The research finishes by highlighting the modern relevance of the Magna Carta in government and education, and advocating for a more profound comprehension of its historical and present importance.

Spiritual Calculations: Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons, by Christine Cooper-Rompato

Spiritual Calculations: Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons, by Christine Cooper-Rompato

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages: Regionalism and Nationalism in Medieval English Literature by Joseph Taylor (review)

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages: Regionalism and Nationalism in Medieval English Literature by Joseph Taylor (review)

“But Now I Consydre Thy Necesse”: Augustine’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness and the Restoration of Racial Hierarchies in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

This paper examines the depiction of Jewish and Christian merchants in the medieval English Host miracle play, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. This play is a critical illustration of religious racialization, effectively demonstrating the perpetuation of anti-Jewish stereotypes and legitimizing violence. Positioned within a broader scholarly debate, particularly in relation to Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness, the play portrays Jews as allegorical figures that validate Christian theological constructs. This paper delves into the representation and linguistic depiction of Jewish characters in the play, emphasizing their systematic dehumanization and instrumentalization in Christian narratives. A significant focus is placed on the coerced conversion of Jewish characters, which forces them into the archetype of the “Wandering Jew”, thereby highlighting motifs of symbolic aggression and unending diaspora. This paper also confronts contemporary scholarly perspectives that view the play as challenging religious boundaries, positing that such interpretations overlook the ingrained racialization and marginalization of Jewish identity during the European Middle Ages. It argues that the play’s transient disruption of power dynamics ultimately reinforces prevailing social hierarchies, thereby solidifying deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments.

Evgenia Vladimirovna Gutnova as a Historiographer of the English Medieval Parliament: The Anglo-American Research Perspective

This article considers the Anglo-American historiography of the early English parliament based on the extensive contribution and heritage of Evgenia Vladimirovna Gutnova (1914–1992), an outstanding Soviet and Russian medievalist and historiographer. E.V. Gutnova was a pioneer and groundbreaker in the historical and historiographical study of the English state and medieval parliamentarism during the 13th–14th centuries. Through her work, she expanded the pool of historiographical sources available to the scientific world. This vast collection included the fundamental works on the English constitutional history of the Middle Ages published by major historians of England and the USA in the middle of the 19th–the first half of the 20th centuries. She performed a detailed analysis of their concepts of the English medieval parliament by comparison of the Whig-liberal (W. Stubbs) and “critical” (F.W. Maitland) models in line with the Marxist methodologies of history. Here, based on the historical-genetic and -comparative methods, along with historical analysis and synthesis, E.V. Gutnova’s role in the study of the early English parliamentarism within the Anglo-American historiography was defined. The conclusion is made that she developed and introduced an innovative historiographical concept, which has become a widely used algorithm for research in the field of foreign history of historical science, with the Anglo-American historiography of early parliamentarism in England as its integral part.

Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, c. 1100–c. 1530

Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, c. 1100–c. 1530

Prosody in Medieval English and Norse by Nelson Goering (review)

Prosody in Medieval English and Norse by Nelson Goering (review)

Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire by Hannah Piercy (review)

Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire by Hannah Piercy (review)

Review: The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism, Adrienne Williams Boyarin

Review: The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism, Adrienne Williams Boyarin