This book explores the relations and exchanges between Flanders and the Anglo-Norman realm following the union of England and Normandy in 1066.

The most recent cutting-edge scholarship on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries.

This collection of essays discusses East Anglia in the context of a medieval maritime framework and explores the extent to which there was a distinctive community bound together by the shared frontier of the North Sea during the Middle Ages. It brings together the work of a range of international scholars and includes contributions from the disciplines of history, archaeology, art history and literary studies.

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript—a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament—Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

Modern historians of the Normans have tended to treat their enterprises and achievements as a series of separate and discrete histories. Such treatments are valid and valuable, but historical understanding of the Normans also depends as much on broader approaches akin to those adopted in this book. As the successor volume to Norman Expansion: Connections, Continuities and Contrasts, it complements and significantly extends its findings to provide a fuller appreciation of the roles played by the Normans as one of the most dynamic and transformative forces in the history of medieval ‘Outer Europe’. It includes panoramic essays that dissect the conceptual and methodological issues concerned, suggest strategies for avoiding associated pitfalls, and indicate how far and in what ways the Normans and their legacies served to reshape sociopolitical landscapes across a vast geography extending from the remoter corners of the British Isles to the Mediterranean basin. Leading experts in their fields also provide case-by-case analyses, set within and between different areas, of themes such as lordship and domination, identities and identification, naming patterns, marriage policies, saints’ cults, intercultural exchanges, and diaspora–homeland connections. The Normans and the ‘Norman Edge’ therefore presents a potent combination of thought-provoking overviews and fresh insights derived from new research, and its wide-ranging comparative focus has the advantage of illuminating aspects of the Norman past that traditional regional or national histories often do not reveal so clearly. It likewise makes a major contribution to current Norman scholarship by reconsidering the links between Norman expansion and ‘state-formation’; the extent to which Norman practices and priorities were distinctive; the balance between continuity and innovation; relations between the Normans and the indigenous peoples and cultures they encountered; and, not least, forms of Norman identity and their resilience over time. An extensive bibliography is also one of this book’s strengths.

In around 911, the Viking adventurer Rollo was granted the city of Rouen and its surrounding district by the Frankish King Charles the Simple. Two further grants of territory followed in 924 and 933. But while Frankish kings might grant this land to Rollo and his son, William Longsword, these two Norman dukes and their successors had to fight and negotiate with rival lords, hostile neighbours, kings, and popes in order to establish and maintain their authority over it. This book explores the geographical and political development of what would become the duchy of Normandy, and the relations between the dukes and these rivals for their lands and their subjects' fidelity. It looks, too, at the administrative machinery the dukes built to support their regime, from their toll-collectors and vicomtes (an official similar to the English sheriff) to the political theatre of their courts and the buildings in which they were staged. At the heart of this exercise are the narratives that purport to tell us about what the dukes did, and the surviving body of the dukes' diplomas. Neither can be taken at face value, and both tell us as much about the concerns and criticisms of the dukes' subjects as they do about the strength of the dukes' authority. The diplomas, in particular, because most of them were not written by scribes attached to the dukes' households but rather by their beneficiaries, can be used to recover something of how the dukes' subjects saw their rulers, as well as something of what they wanted or needed from them. Ducal power was the result of a dialogue, and this volume enables both sides to speak. Mark Hagger is a senior lecturer in medieval history at Bangor University.

New insights into interpretive problems in the history of England and Europe between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.

The latest research on aspects of the Anglo-Norman world. The contributions collected here demonstrate the full range and vitality of current work on the Anglo-Norman period, from a variety of different angles and disciplines. Topics include architecture and material remains in Winchester, Kent and Hampshire; the role of Duke Richard II and Abbot John of Fécamp in early Normandy; political and liturgical culture at the Anglo-Norman and Angevin courts; the lost (illustrated?) prototype of Dudo of Saint-Quentin's early Norman history and Geoffrey of Monmouth's motivation for his Historia Regum Britonum; twelfth-century legal scholarship and the archaic use of vernacular vocabulary in law texts; trade and travel; and a study of episcopal acta from the south-western Norman dioceses. Contributors: Richard Allen, Pierre Bauduin, Johanna Dale, Jennifer Farrell, Peter Fergusson, Sara Harris, Nicholas Karn, Edmund King, Lauren Mancia, Eljas Oksanen, Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, Benjamin Pohl, Katherine Weikert

This first modern study of Henry the Young King, eldest son of Henry II but the least known Plantagenet monarch, explores the brief but eventful life of the only English ruler after the Norman Conquest to be created co-ruler in his father's lifetime. Crowned at fifteen to secure an undisputed succession, Henry played a central role in the politics of Henry II's great empire and was hailed as the embodiment of chivalry. Yet, consistently denied direct rule, the Young King was provoked first into heading a major rebellion against his father, then to waging a bitter war against his brother Richard for control of Aquitaine, dying before reaching the age of thirty having never assumed actual power. In this remarkable history, Matthew Strickland provides a richly colored portrait of an all-but-forgotten royal figure tutored by Thomas Becket, trained in arms by the great knight William Marshal, and incited to rebellion by his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, while using his career to explore the nature of kingship, succession, dynastic politics, and rebellion in twelfth-century England and France.

The Flemish are among the most important if under-appreciated immigrant groups to have shaped the history of medieval and early modern Scotland. Originating in Flanders, Northern Europe's economic powerhouse (now roughly Belgium and the Netherlands), they came to Scotland as soldiers and settlers, traders and tradesmen, diplomats and dynasts, over a period of several centuries following the Norman Conquest of England in the eleventh century. Several of Scotland's major families – the Flemings, Murrays, Sutherlands, Lindsays and Douglases for instance– claim elite Flemish roots, while many other families arrived as craftsmen, mercenaries and religiously persecuted émigrés. Adaptable and creative people, Flemish immigrants not only adjusted to Scotland's very different environment, but left their profound mark on the country's economic, social and cultural development. From pantiles to golf, from place names to town planning, the evidence of Flemish influence is still readily traceable in Scotland today. This book examines the nature of Flemish settlement in Scotland, the development of economic, diplomatic and cultural links between Scotland and Flanders, and the lasting impact of the Flemish people on Scottish society and culture.