scholarly journals Women’s Acts of Childbirth and Conquest in English Historical Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-167
Author(s):  
Emma O. Bérat
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Political History ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Birth Stories ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Female Bodies

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, and the anonymous ancestral romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn. In these principally high medieval texts, there is little of the squeamishness around parturition sometimes found in later French and Middle English romances. Rather, female characters give birth outdoors, underground, on contested borders, and accompanied by visions of conquest. The writers attribute the women with effort, activity, and political astuteness, as these political and figurative acts of childbirth shape the women’s relationships to land and those of their descendants.

scholarly journals Reseña de Edurne Garrido-Anes (2020) A Middle English Version of the Circa Instans, Middle English Texts Series, 59. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, pp. 209. ISBN 978-3-8253-4766-6

2021 ◽  
pp. 189-192
Author(s):  
María José Esteve-Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Natural Consequence ◽  
English Version ◽  
English Edition ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
University Library ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Medical and scientific manuscripts have been the interest of scholarly attention in recent decades and as a natural consequence, editions of unstudied material have flourished (Alonso-Almeida, 2014 or Marqués-Aguado, T. et alii, 2008, among others). This book is a Middle English edition of one of the most popular works circulating in the late medieval England, known as Circa Instans. This book presents a revised edition of the text found in CUL MS Es 1.13. ff 1r-91v, housed in the Cambridge University Library.

scholarly journals York’s Guilds’ Names in the 15th Century and Their Translation into Spanish

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Mourón Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Corpus Christi Cycle ◽  
Definition Of

En la Inglaterra de la Baja Edad Media, los gremios de la ciudad de York se encargaban de representar escenas bíblicas tomadas del ciclo de Corpus Christi. Nuestro objetivo principal será describir, definir y traducir los nombres de los gremios que aparecen en la lista de Burton (1415). Asimismo, trataremos problemas surgidos del intento de establecer una correspondencia adecuada entre los términos en inglés medio, en español y la definición del gremio. Como veremos, los términos que designan a los gremios ingleses no suelen reflejar con exactitud aquellos usados para los gremios medievales españoles o para trabajos y profesiones actuales.Palabras clave: Gremios de York, ciclo de Corpus Christi, traducción, inglés medio, comercio.ABSTRACTIn late medieval England, YorkKs guilds were responsible for the performance of short Biblical scenes from the Corpus Christi cycle. Since no translation of the whole cycle into Spanish is available, we will describe, define and translate the guildsK names in BurtonKs list (1415). We will also deal with some problems found when establishing an accurate correspondence among the terms in Middle English, in Spanish and the definition of the craft. The terms which designate the English guilds do not exactly reflect those used for the Spanish medieval gremios or for current trades and jobs in English and Spanish.Key words: YorkKs guilds, Corpus Christi cycle, translation, Middle English, trade

Conclusion

Law in Common ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Late Medieval England

The conclusion briefly summarizes the arguments of the book, before going on to consider their implications for how the social and political history of late-medieval England is to be understood as a more cohesive narrative of transformation. Specifically, it suggests that the legal structures—both local legal cultures and common legalities—discussed in the book can be understood as a part of a ‘common constitution’ that emerged in post-plague society, binding people together in a shared understanding of governance, making possible the kinds of expansive claim made by late-medieval government. In this way, the conclusion gestures towards a way of writing political history of the everyday.

scholarly journals THE TWENTY-FIVE JOYS OF OUR LADY AN ENGLISH MARIAN ROSARY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY FROM BODLEIAN LIBRARY MS DON. D. 85

Traditio ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 333-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. HIRSH
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Limited Evidence ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Late Medieval England

“The Twenty-five Joys of Our Lady” is a study, examination, and critical edition of an unpublished fifteenth-century Middle English prose devotion preserved in Bodleian Library MS Don. d. 85. It is here associated with twenty-five “Joys of Our Lady” and presented as a vernacular Marian rosary, the first such to be identified in the period. The introduction to the edition considers early liturgical influences upon what became the tradition of Our Lady's Joys, their late-medieval development both across Europe and across England, and the circumstances that usually indicated fewer in number than is present in the devotion printed here. The introduction also concerns itself with the presence and practice of the rosary itself in late-medieval England and elsewhere and the limited evidence that has come down to us for its presence and circulation in England, including woodcut evidence in Caxton and allusions in other Latin devotions. It further indicates an ambiguity in this devotion's treatment of Christ's passion and concludes by considering the role and importance of joy as a pervasive, if often ignored, Christian attitude present in late-medieval English devotion.

The vision of music in a Lollard florilegium: Cantus in the Middle English Rosarium theologie (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 354/581)

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-106
Author(s):  
Bruce W. Holsinger
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
John Wyclif

Despite their intriguing testimony to the vagaries of musical life in late medieval England, relatively little attention has been given by musicologists and historians of religion to the wealth of commentary on liturgical and secular music penned by the followers of the Oxford heretic John Wyclif. In a brief mention of this material in The Premature Reformation, her magisterial study of Wyclif and the Lollards, Anne Hudson suggests that the Lollards’ suspicion of musical display reflected their more general hostility towards the decoration of churches.

scholarly journals “L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
Estella Ciobanu
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Drama ◽  
Biblical Drama ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Gender Specific ◽  
Social Suppression

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between sin and its retribution as depicted in three Middle English biblical plays concerned with retribution, Noah’s Flood, the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgement, in the Chester biblical drama collection. The plays’ general tenor is, to modern sensibilities, conservative and disciplinarian with respect to social mores. Yet, studying the portrayal of sin against the plays’ social background may uncover secular mutations of the Christian conceptualisation of sin as a function of gender as well as estate. Chester’s Last Judgement dramatises sin in accordance with fifteenth-century ecclesiastical and secular developments which criminalise people along gender-specific, not just trade-specific, lines. In showing Mulier as the only human being whom Christ leaves behind in hell after his redemptive descensus, the Harrowing dooms not just the brewers’ and alehouse-keepers’ dishonesty, as imputed to brewsters in late medieval England, but women themselves, if under the guise of their trade-related dishonesty. The underside of the Chester Noahs’ cleansing voyage is women’s ideological and social suppression. Whether or not we regard the Good Gossips’ wine-drinking – for fear of the surging waters – or Mrs Noah’s defiant resistance to her husband as a performance of the sin of humankind calling for the punitive deluge, the script gives female characters a voice not only to show their sinfulness. Rather, like the Harrowing of Hell and less so the Last Judgement, Noah’s Flood, I argue, participates in a hegemonic game which appropriates one sin of the tongue, gossip, to make it backfire against those incriminated for using it in the first place: women.

John Northwood’s Miscellany Revisited

Insular Books ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Scase
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
British Library ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Related Material ◽  
English Verse ◽  
West Midlands ◽  
Late Medieval England

London, British Library, MS Additional 37787, a volume of prayers and other devotions and related material, was part-edited by Nita S. Baugh as A Worcestershire Miscellany Compiled by John Northwood c. 1400 (1956). Baugh’s title was based on ownership inscriptions of John Northwood, monk at Bordesley Abbey, Worcestershire, and members of the Throckmorton family also of Worcestershire. These associations have made the manuscript an important witness in narratives about Cistercian participation in the production and circulation of Middle English verse manuscripts in the West Midlands and the role of monasteries in fostering vernacular writing and book production, including the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts. This chapter proposes that this view is called into question by careful codicological examination of the volume. Through challenging these propositions it suggests alternative ways to explore and explain the production of books containing vernacular prayers and devotions in late medieval England.

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