"Teachers' bulletin", vol. 4- issued as part of v. 23, no. 9-

The chantries of medieval England were founded in the belief that intercessory masses shortened the period spent by souls in purgatory. They played a greater role in the daily life of sixteenth-century Englishmen than did monasteries, yet up to now the dissolution of the chantries has not been a popular subject of study. Alan Kreider rectifies this, establishing the importance of the chantries in the story of late medieval and Reformation England. He discusses their social and religious significance. He explains the role of purgatory in the founding of chantries and in the theological debates, popular preaching and political struggles unleashed by the Reformation that led to their confiscation. He explores the forces that led the governments of Henry VIII and Edward VI to jettison traditional practices, and he underlines the pain of state-fostered religious change. Book jacket.

Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England reconstructs the life of Ralph Rishton, a member of the sixteenth-century Lancashire gentry who was a child bridegroom and a serial wife-discarder, who bribed church officials to obtain a forged annulment, defrauded a kinsman out of his inheritance, and adroitly manipulated his own and other people's land. The dozens of lawsuits in which the Rishtons were involved, in many different courts, elucidate one family's engagement with law in Tudor England: how they used and misused law, how it shaped their perceptions of rights and mutual obligations, and how it framed litigants' and witnesses' language. Drawing upon trial and estate records, the core of this study is the central narrative of Ralph Rishton's three wives, of litigiousness and violence, marriage and property, and the pursuit of equitable resolutions to disputes, along with countless smaller narratives that vividly capture a culture in its time and place. Alongside that central narrative, L. R. Poos uses the Rishton stories as a starting-point to analyse child marriage, the construction of memory, and the development of local historical identity through antiquarians and the Victorian and Edwardian local press, demonstrating how - from the time of the Rishtons into the twentieth century - historical narratives were continually reshaped and repurposed.