Premodern England Research Articles

Land rights in historical Vietnam: Theory and evidence

I develop a theory to study the determination of land rights in precolonial Vietnam, in which the state uses restrictive land rights to tie landless peasants to their land, in order to collect head taxes and enforce unpaid labor services and military conscription. Using a unique national land registry in nineteenth-century Vietnam, I find suggestive evidence supporting a hypothesis that higher population density is associated with lower prevalence of private land rights. The experience of historical Vietnam stands in contrast to the standard prediction that private land rights should become more widespread when population density increases and land becomes more valuable. A comparison with the enclosure movement in premodern England provides useful lessons on the development of private land rights in an agricultural economy.

Nationhood and the (De)Construction of Mythical England in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List

Arthurian mythology has often been employed to articulate notions of nationhood, identity, and nationalism. In the recent wave of nationalist nostalgia, myths, such as Arthur’s, have been put forth as core narratives to return to, articulating the longing for a primitivist, pastoral, pre-modern England. The post-Brexit landscape has seen a rise of neo-imperialism, more obvious in so-called ‘global Britain’ / ‘Renaissance England’, overlooking how Britain and its polarisation seem to be closer in spirit now to the Civil War than to the times of hegemonic splendour. This article analyses how Wheatley’s 2011 Kill List reappropriates Arthurian mythology by subverting its usual purpose of reaffirming a hegemonic sense of nationhood. The analysis uses three main methods: defining myth in contemporary England and its cultural products, establishing a correlation between Folk Horror and the Arthurian legend, and studying Arthurian myths and motifs present in the film and their significance. It ultimately concludes that the Arthurian myth is used to question the blinding embrace of national mythology and the darker face of England’s nationhood.

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Homosociality, Sexual Misconduct and Gendered Violence in England’s Pre-Modern Legal Profession

Abstract Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century evidence shows that common lawyers and law students regularly engaged in sexual misconduct and violence against women. Social histories of the early legal profession give little attention to such incidents, treating them as aberrations or as the ‘natural’ excess of privileged youth. By contrast, this article uses gender analysis to argue that sexual misconduct and gendered violence were structural features of all-male legal culture, contributing to homosocial bonding and to lawyers’ performance of masculinity. Records from the Inns of Court, London civic administration and royal government reveal law students asserting manhood through shared involvement in sexual misconduct and violence. However, it is significant for the history of the profession that young men were not the only offenders. While senior practitioners condemned misconduct and violence in rules and disciplinary regulations, in practice they shielded fellow lawyers from consequences and participated themselves. As perpetrators went on to become barristers, serjeants-at-law, judges and public office-holders, a tradition of toleration and intergenerational complicity was sustained across time. These findings generate new insights into how the training and socialization of lawyers contributed to the gendered violence inherent in the patriarchal judicial system of pre-modern England.

Amy Kaplan on Realism and the Imperatives of Empire

Amy Kaplan on Realism and the Imperatives of Empire

John Theilmann, Disease and Society in Premodern England. New York: Routledge, 2022, ix, 278 pp.

Abstract The pandemic has stimulated interest in past epidemics, especially the Black Death, and John Theilmann’s Disease and Society in Premodern England is a welcome contribution to this literature. Focusing on England from 1000 to 1600, the book provides a useful introduction to the topic of health and disease in the Middle Ages.

Breaking the peace: Representation, affect and materiality in pre-modern England

The pax was an object intended both to symbolise and to enforce peace among Christian congregations in pre-modern Europe and so when a man named John Browne smashed one over the head of the parish clerk during one of the holiest services of the year in a church in southeast England something had evidently gone wrong. This article is dedicated to explaining not only why Browne reacted with such fury at precisely the moment when he was expected to do the opposite but also why the pax and the clerk were chosen as his victims. The pax's material and visual qualities are integral, and overlooked, parts of this story but it is only by relating them to its representational and institutional contexts that Browne's actions begin to make sense. By integrating the material and the semiotic in this way, this article posits a conceptual structure for explicating not only an important dimension of the relationship between materiality, representation and affectivity but also how such relationships can, indeed must, be historicised to particular objects, ideologies and institutions.

Identidad inglesa premoderna y otredad romana en Cimbelino de Shakespeare: consideraciones desde el género

This paper aims at characterizing Shakespeare’s Cymbeline relying upon some aspects featured by Shakespearean Roman history genre, as those reveal various tensions between the English premodern identity and the Roman ethos, which was considered an imperialist model by Jacobean and Elizabethan England. This analysis is carried out from a revisionist historical perspective of premodern England, and from the idiosyncratic framework of Shakespearean Roman history plays. It is concluded that Cymbeline displays an ironic dialectics between the double canon of Roman ethos, romanitas and pietas, positioning it as contradictory and detrimental for the social health of the body politics. Shakespeare’s Rome in Cymbeline represents the contrary to the idealized model used by Elizabethan imperial propaganda in the process of construction of their national poiesis.

Usury Enforcement as an Alternative to Capital Taxation in Pre-Modern States

All governments have an obligation to protect their territory and the wealth within that territory from external predation. In fact, since war has historically resulted in the plunder and destruction of wealth, it seems straightforward to suggest that the cost of providing adequate defense of one's territory is a function of the accumulated wealth within the territory. Suppose that all wealth in society is capital. The accumulation of capital conveys a private benefit to its owner, but imposes an external cost on society. As with any externality, the optimal tax policy would be to tax capital. The revenue from capital taxation could then be used to finance defense. Such a taxation scheme, however, requires the state to have an appropriate level of bureaucratic capacity. During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, this sort of state infrastructure did not exist. Yet the rulers of those states faced the same constraint. In this paper, I argue that the enforcement of usury laws during this period imperfectly replicate the outcome of the optimal capital tax. Lending at interest was prohibited. However, rulers often allowed certain groups to lend in society in exchange for a license fee. This granted monopoly status to lenders. At the same time, rulers imposed binding price ceilings on interest rates. The combination of these three characteristics of enforcement replicate the long-run restriction on capital accumulation of the optimal capital tax whereas the licensing fees allowed the governments to collect as much as half of the revenue that the optimal capital tax would generate. Given that some defense costs were paid in kind, this sort of policy is capable of replicating the optimal capital tax. I support this claim with historical examples of ``lombard'' and Jewish lending in pre-modern England, Italy, and France.

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England by Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano

Reviewed by: The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England by Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano Kate Crassons THE CIVIC CYCLES: ARTISAN DRAMA AND IDENTITY IN PREMODERN ENGLAND. By Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern series. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015; pp. 376. In this stunning comparative study of civic drama—a form of premodern theatre sponsored by craft guilds—Nicole Rice and Margaret Pappano argue that the York and Chester play cycles perform "artisan identity." The pageants in York and Chester become, for their artisan producers, actors, and "authors," a means of political engagement and self-representation. The plays affirm the status of artisans as a group that is distinct from both a mercantile elite and a lower rung of unenfranchised people, including foreigners, day laborers, women, and the poor. While the York and Chester play cycles are united by the promotion of an artisan identity, this construct nonetheless has "distinct valences in each town" (4). As a site of resistance to a mercantile ruling elite, "the York pageants highlight individual craft distinction while representing the civic body as continually produced, defended and made whole by artisan contributions" (33). In Chester, however, the plays function less as an "economic mechanism," serving instead as "the artisans' tool for social distinction . . . in collaboration with the city government and in opposition to . . . others beneath them in the social hierarchy" (34–35). The authors initially trace a series of fascinating connections between the occupation of the craftsman and the mode of dramatic representation. Artisan production and dramatic production are both forms of work that require collaboration and a "cooperative mentality" (25). The artisan's work and the actor's craft are aligned in being forms of "bodily discipline" that generate knowledge through experience rather than through text-based forms of learning (26). And the spheres of artisan and dramatic production are also connected by a shared understanding of "innovation through practice" (26–27). In addition to highlighting these connections, the book's introduction lays out its argument in clear and compelling terms. It also offers a wealth of material that not only provides an overview of English cycle drama, but also outlines the distinctive guild systems, political structures, and theatrical enterprises of York and Chester. In chapter 1, Rice and Pappano examine the first pageant of each cycle, The Fall of the Angels (York) and The Fall of Lucifer (Chester), both performed by the Tanners. Highlighting the interrelations between Corpus Christi procession and drama, the authors intriguingly link the angels' competitive struggle for brightness with conflicts among torch-bearing guilds seeking to secure prominent placement in the procession. In the second chapter, they read the York cycle's Herod and the Magi pageant in concert with the histories of the Goldsmiths and Masons, who co-produced the play from 1432 to 1477. Rice and Pappano link the discourse of "seeking" in the pageant with the custom of searching—the practice of inspecting artisan goods for quality assurance or trade infringement. Challenging traditional scholarly assessments, they show how the "ambiguous practice [of searching] [End Page 240] may be fundamental to creating 'peace' between members of the same craft and among members of the wider artisan body" (95). The chapter's pioneering argument is bolstered by an innovative account showing how the Masons and other building trades continued to claim searching as an artisan-oriented practice in their revival of The Purification of the Virgin pageant during the period 1477 to 1561. In chapter 3, Rice and Pappano identify changes in the way that craftsmen in York sought to distinguish themselves from unenfranchised servants and wage laborers. Through readings of the "Judas plays," they argue that in the fifteenth century, artisans sought both to affirm their social status and to control servant labor by promoting an ideal of unity aimed at drawing mobile workers into the stable civic body that they claimed as their particular domain. During the sixteenth century, however, the Glovers' Cain and Abel pageant showed greater concern for the potential socioeconomic downfall of the master, and it ultimately advocated a program of social exclusion aimed at circumscribing civic...

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England by Nicole R. Rice, Margaret Pappano

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England by Nicole R. Rice, Margaret Pappano

Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano. The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England.

Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano. The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England.

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. By Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano . ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015; pp. xii + 360, 9 illustrations. $42 paper.

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. By Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano . ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015; pp. xii + 360, 9 illustrations. $42 paper. - Volume 58 Issue 3

Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England

Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, <i>The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England</i>

Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. (Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern.) Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Paper. Pp. xii, 360; 4 black-and-white figures, 9 color plates, and 2 maps. $42. ISBN: 978-0-268-03900-4.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsNicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. (Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern.) Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Paper. Pp. xii, 360; 4 black-and-white figures, 9 color plates, and 2 maps. $42. ISBN: 978-0-268-03900-4.Lisa H. CooperLisa H. CooperUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 92, Number 2April 2017 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690488 Views: 36Total views on this site Copyright 2017 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Stephen Brogan. The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine, and Sin. (Royal Historical Society Studies in History.) xi + 265 pp., illus., figs., tables, bibl., index. Woodbridge, Suffolk/Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2015. £50 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article FreeStephen Brogan. The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine, and Sin. (Royal Historical Society Studies in History.) xi + 265 pp., illus., figs., tables, bibl., index. Woodbridge, Suffolk/Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2015. £50 (cloth).Peter ElmerPeter Elmer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA modern study of the place of the royal touch in medieval and early modern English society is long overdue. Since the pioneering works of Raymond Crawfurd (1911) and Marc Bloch (1924), historians have largely neglected the subject, with one or two notable exceptions. In more recent times, Keith Thomas has hinted at the potential richness of the subject, and in my own work on the Irish “stroker” Valentine Greatrakes I have spoken briefly about Charles II’s role as a sacral and charismatic healer of scrofula, or the king’s evil. The subject, however, is generally overlooked or relegated to a footnote. Stephen Brogan’s book, then, is a welcome contribution, providing the reader with an accessible and fresh treatment of the subject based on a wide range of primary source material.At the heart of the book lies a renewed emphasis on understanding the royal touch as representing a crucial interface between medicine, politics, and religion in medieval and early modern England. Brogan provides a valuable discussion of the origins of the phenomenon in early medieval England and France, charting the growth in its popularity through the Middle Ages and culminating in the period of its apogee after 1603. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the book focuses on the seventeenth century, reflecting both the real surge in the tendency among those suffering from the king’s evil to resort to the monarch for help and the much greater survival of documentation for the practice. The seventeenth century also witnessed one or two notable publications on the subject, which provide illuminating insights into social and medical aspects pertaining to the royal touch.There are some interesting new insights. In particular, Brogan unearths important evidence that helps to provide an answer as to why James I changed his mind about touching after his accession to the throne, as well as firm evidence to suggest the extent of Charles I’s participation in the ritual. There is also much new material that casts light on the interplay between the medical and political imperatives behind the royal touch in the years following the collapse of royal authority in 1640. The overwhelming impression here is of a medical intervention on the part of the Crown that was constantly undergoing change and evolution—in part reflecting the concerns of individual monarchs, but also in recognition of the broader religious and political context in which English rulers practiced kingship in the seventeenth century.The Royal Touch in Early Modern England is not, however, without its problems. Relevant source material is thin on the ground, and that which does survive is often difficult to interpret. Much of what was written about the royal touch was clearly, as Brogan admits, propagandistic in aim. I am skeptical, for example, of the value that can be placed on the evidence of men like the surgeon John Browne, who asserts, without any corroborating evidence, examples of nonconformists submitting successfully to cure at the hands of the king. Browne was writing at a critical moment in the conflict between the Crown and its opponents. His work cannot, therefore, be seen as an entirely objective assessment of the merits and popularity of the practice. Hearsay evidence also permeates much of the book, where many of those who comment on the royal touch do so from a vantage point often far removed from the events they describe. There is no doubt that this complicates our historical understanding of the subject matter. It is to Brogan’s credit, however, that he is both aware of these limitations and that he largely succeeds here in overcoming them, producing an engaging, critical, and readable assessment of the place of the royal touch in premodern England. Notes Peter Elmer is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at Exeter University, where he is working on a Wellcome Trust–funded project to create an electronic database of medical practitioners in early modern England, Wales, and Ireland. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 108, Number 1March 2017 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690805 © 2017 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. xii + 360 pp. + 8 color pls. $42.

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. xii + 360 pp. + 8 color pls. $42.

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England

The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen

Reviewed by: The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen Carrie Griffin (bio) Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, editors. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 94. Cambridge UP, 2015. 302pp. £67.00. In their prefatory remarks, the editors of this timely volume, Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, highlight the tendency among many medieval book historians to produce “tightly focused analyses of individual manuscripts or small groups of codices” (1), citing James Simpson’s critique that palaeographers and codicologists fail to translate their findings into “literary criticism and cultural history.” The collection they mastermind—The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches—successfully marks a move away from such tightly focused studies toward a reappraisal of manuscripts as “objects within the cultural world, where people interact with them in meaningful, readable ways” (2). The essays ask broad questions about book culture in later medieval Europe but significantly they are underpinned by those aspects of traditional manuscript studies, and this is the strength of the collection: there are no single case studies, and instead scholars use their intimate knowledge of manuscript production and use to make “broader interpretive claims about manuscript culture” (12). It is this philosophy (not a new idea, as acknowledged by the editors, but applied to medieval studies in pockets only) that drives the collection, informing the thirteen contributions and challenging, “gauntlet-like” the “entire field of medieval literary studies” (Kerby-Fulton 243). The essays gathered here are consistently strong, privileging theoretical assessments of questions around matters such as authorship, the manuscript-print nexus, circulation, archival practices, and miscellaneity, while (necessarily) retaining a strong foundation in close readings of the book; as such they are both provocative and informative. Some of the contributions suggest ways in which we might refocus our treatment of and relationship with the medieval book. Seth Lerer’s essay opens by looking at the complex relationship between manuscript and printed books, asserting that manuscripts were designed to be unique but that early printed books, for all their indebtedness to the manuscript, were never meant to pass as manuscripts. “Bibliographical theory and the textuality of the codex: towards a history of the premodern book” (17–33) argues that early printed books and manuscripts did not exist simply to transmit authorial content but instead were [End Page 556] “shaped by the commercial, scribal, and social institutions of the time” (18). Lerer’s piece looks at how the medieval impulse to compile “shades into” compilation practices evident in early printed books, specifically in Sammelbände (19), examining also the various ways in which early printed books could be and indeed were transformed into unique objects. In “What is manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix” (34–59), Stephen G. Nichols suggests that we are too dependent, despite our technological sophistication, on “analog protocols developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (34) with respect to our attitudes to medieval manuscripts. He suggests that we can profitably consider them a “technology,” produced in “urban micro-cultures” requiring high levels of skill and interpretative acts that are visible on each page, rather than as irregular, artisanal, and idiosyncratic objects that require to be replaced by critical editions. “Manuscripts,” Nichols argues, “situate their texts in contemporary history” (36). Jeffrey Todd Knight’s “Organising manuscript and print: from compilatio compilation” (77–95) also studies a Sammelband, here in order to think through “the complex entanglement of print and manuscript . . . in the reading and writing cultures of late pre-modern England” (77). Several of the essays offer thought-provoking reassessments of commonly debated issues and cruxes in the field medieval book history. Erik Kwakkel, in “Decoding the material book: cultural residue in medieval manuscripts” (60–76), is concerned with the kind of information that can be gleaned from the codex itself apart from in the words: the “data embedded in the physicality of the object itself” (60). His essay examines what looking beyond the textual content might teach us about the scribe, the relationship between that scribe and the reader, and the anticipated use for the volume, concluding that “book design may relate manuscripts to their milieu of production, readers, and manner of use...

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England eds. by Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England eds. by Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano