This collection of essays, the Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium, looks at the importance of family and dynasty among royalty and powerful aristocrats, mercantile and clerical families, and those of lower aristocratic status. The eleven contributors examine the use of genealogy by these families for legitimation and proving descent, and the often conflicting relationship between loyalty to family and society as a whole, the Church, king or realm. Among the families discussed are the Angevin monarchy, the Wayte, Mortimer and Bohun families and the family of Lady Margaret Beaufort.

It is well known that political, economic, and social power in the British Isles in the Middle Ages lay in the hands of a small group of domini-lords. In his final book, the late Sir Rees Davies explores the personalities of these magnates, the nature of their lordship, and the ways in which it was expressed in a diverse and divided region in the period 1272-1422. Although their right to rule was rarely questioned, the lords flaunted their identity and superiority through the promotion of heraldic lore, the use of elevated forms of address, and by the extravagant display of their wealth and power. Their domestic routine, furnishings, dress, diet, artistic preferences, and pastimes all spoke of a lifestyle of privilege and authority. Warfare was a constant element in their lives, affording access to riches and reputation, but also carrying the danger of capture, ruin and even death, while their enthusiasm for crusades and tournaments testified to their energy and bellicose inclinations. Above all, underpinning the lords' control of land was their control of men-a complex system of dependence and reward that Davies restores to central significance by studying the British Isles as a whole. The exercise and experience of lordship was far more varied than the English model alone would suggest.

A wide ranging survey of the medieval secular college and its context.

Richard's family was his making and undoing...

A groundbreaking assessment of the use medieval English history-writers made of saints' lives. The past was ever present in later medieval England, as secular and religious institutions worked to recover (or create) originary narratives that could guarantee, they hoped, their political and spiritual legitimacy. Anglo-SaxonEngland, in particular, was imagined as a spiritual "golden age" and a rich source of precedent, for kings and for the monasteries that housed early English saints' remains. This book examines the vernacular hagiography produced in a monastic context, demonstrating how writers, illuminators, and policy-makers used English saints (including St Edmund) to re-envision the bonds between ancient spiritual purity and contemporary conditions. Treating history and ethical practice as inseparable, poets such as Osbern Bokenham, Henry Bradshaw, and John Lydgate reconfigured England's history through its saints, engaging with contemporary concerns about institutional identity, authority, and ethics. Cynthia Turner Camp is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia.

The Middle Ages (800–1400) were a rich and vibrant period in the history of European culture, society, and intellectual thought. Emerging state powers, economic expansion and contraction, the growing influence of the Christian Church, and demographic change all influenced the ideals and realities of childhood and family life. Movements for Church reform brought the spiritual and moral concerns of the laity into sharper focus, profoundly shaping attitudes towards gender and sexuality and how these might be applied to family roles. At the same time, the growth of trade, the spread of literacy and learning, shifting patterns of settlement, and the process of urbanization transformed childhood. This volume explores the ideas and practices which underpinned contemporary perceptions of childhood in the medieval West, and illuminates the enduring importance of the family as a dynamic economic, political, and social unit. A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages presents essays on family relationships, community, economy, geography and the environment, education, life cycle, the state, faith and religion, health and science, and world contexts.

Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England offers a new history of Middle English romance, the most popular genre of secular literature in the English Middle Ages. Michael Johnston argues that many of the romances composed in England from 1350-1500 arose in response to the specific socio-economic concerns of the gentry, the class of English landowners who lacked titles of nobility and hence occupied the lower rungs of the aristocracy. The end of the fourteenth century in England witnessed power devolving to the gentry, who became one of the dominant political and economic forces in provincial society. As Johnston demonstrates, this social change also affected England's literary culture, particularly the composition and readership of romance. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England identifies a series of new topoi in Middle English that responded to the gentry's economic interests. But beyond social history and literary criticism, it also speaks to manuscript studies, showing that most of the codices of the "gentry romances" were produced by those in the immediate employ of the gentry. By bringing together literary criticism and manuscript studies, this book speaks to two scholarly communities often insulated from one another: it invites manuscript scholars to pay closer attention to the cultural resonances of the texts within medieval codices; simultaneously, it encourages literary scholars to be more attentive to the cultural resonances of surviving medieval codices.

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

"For fans of Hilary Mantel and The Tudors, this is the dramatic story of the concluding episode in England's War of the Roses, featuring three brothers, two of whom became kings, Edward IV and Richard III, famous from Shakespeare's great history play Richard III"--

Drawing on the expertise of 26 distinguished scholars, this important volume covers the major issues in the study of medieval Europe, highlighting the significant impact the time period had on cultural forms and institutions central to European identity. Examines changing approaches to the study of medieval Europe, its periodization, and central themes Includes coverage of important questions such as identity and the self, sexuality and gender, emotionality and ethnicity, as well as more traditional topics such as economic and demographic expansion; kingship; and the rise of the West Explores Europe’s understanding of the wider world to place the study of the medieval society in a global context