Inspired by the path-breaking work of Robert Tittler, the authors explore late Medieval and Early Modern community and identity across England. They examine the decline of neighbourliness, the politics of market towns, clerical status, charity, crime, and ways in which overlapping communities of court and country, London and Lancashire, relate.

This groundbreaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation – one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward – than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.

A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world. The training and use of memory was crucial in medieval culture, given the limited literacy at the time, but to date, very little thought has been given to the complex and disparate ways in which the theory and practices of memoryinteracted with the inherently unstable concepts of time and gender at the time. The essays in this volume, drawing on approaches from applied poststructural and queer theory among others, reassess those ideologies, meanings and responses generated by the workings of memory within and over "time". Ultimately, they argue for the inherent instability of the traditional gender-time-memory matrix (within which men are configured as the recorders of "history"and women as the repositories of a more inchoate familial and communal knowledge), showing the Middle Ages as a locus for a far more fluid conceptualization of time and memory than has previously been considered. Elizabeth Cox is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; Roberta Magnani is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University; Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Contributors: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Ayoush Lazikani, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Pamela E. Morgan, William Rogers, Patricia Skinner, Victoria Turner.

The latest collection of articles on Anglo-Norman topics, with a particular focus on Wales.

This volume contains collected papers on medieval England's names and naming patterns--mostly forenames or Christian names, but with some attention to family names. According to Rosenthal, there are three lines of assault upon the culture and practice by way of analysis of names and naming--micro-social or family dynamic, village life, and limited name stock that confronts us when we tally the range of names that served the bulk of the population.

This interdisciplinary volume explores social, cultural and biological definitions of youth and age specific to the medieval north, and changing mentalities towards youth and age as a result of political, cultural, and religious transformations in the north.

considers seals from medieval Wales and neighbouring England (the Borders) the market goes beyond Wales ground-breaking treatment of seals as historical documents Has a multidisciplinary scope, covering Art history, Cultural history, Celtic Studies and medieval history uses sigillographic evidence to provide important new insights into the history of medieval Wales and the English border counties

This book provides an evocative insight into the property, power, remarriage, and identity of high-ranking widows in two fundamentally different societies, Iceland and Yorkshire. The legal position of widows in each region is examined in light of evidence from charters, royal records and sagas to establish a detailed picture of practice. Comparison and family reconstruction are important elements, enabling the book to emphasize the placement of widows within the context of society and its institutions, and to consider fully the impact of individual circumstances on the widows’ opportunities for action. The result offers a fresh approach that tests widely accepted generalizations about widows’ independence, highlights differences between regions, and suggests the need to reconsider traditional, rigid definitions of kinship systems.

Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 36 include: The tabernacula of Gregory the Great and the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England by Flora Spiegel; The career of Aldhelm by Michael Lapidge; The name 'Merovingian' and the dating of Beowulf by Walter Goffart; An abbot, an archbishop and the Viking raids of 1006-7 and 1009-12 by Simon Keynes; and Demonstrative behaviour and political communication in later Anglo-Saxon England by Julia Barrow.