Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone’s view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating”…[Read more]

The use of the term “community” in historical studies continues to present problems for many medievalists. Myriad studies have emphasized the inadequacy of the term when describing medieval society. Microstudies of manors and villages, especially in the English context, by historians Barbara A. Hanawalt, J. Ambrose Raftis, and Sherri Olson (am…[Read more]

Art historian Barbara Kellum’s 1973 article on child murder in medieval England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of young children. Despite the overstated tone of her w…[Read more]

The history of homicidal insanity in the courts of law of medieval England.

Given the hurdles one faced in trying to stay healthy in later medieval England, it should come as no surprise that the medieval English placed a premium on competent medicine. As Carole Rawcliffe has argued, “medieval life was beset by constant threats to health arising from poor diet (at both ends of the social spectrum), low levels of h…[Read more]

Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners’ increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an o…[Read more]

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches…[Read more]

In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff enacts his histrionic mock deposition scene, only to be usurped by England’s true heir, Prince Hal. Irate at his actorly demotion, Falstaff praises his own performance skills, while suggesting that, if found lacking, he should receive a punishment befitting his knightly status. Likening Falstaff to small game hanging in a s…[Read more]

Review of Medieval Dublin XVI: Proceedings of Clontarf 1014-2014

By contextualizing the trope of the “unaccommodated man” within Aristotelian notions of insufficiency, this article demonstrates that King Lear theorizes a communitarian politics, rather than one founded in sovereign authority. For late sixteen-century thinkers such as Richard Hooker, Pierre La Primaudaye, and Robert Persons, the vulnerability of…[Read more]

It is often claimed that the mortuary traditions that appeared in lowland Britain in the fifth century AD are an expression of new forms of ethnic identity, based on the putative memorialisation of a ‘Germanic’ heritage. This article considers the empirical basis for this assertion and evaluates it in the light of previously proposed ethnic con…[Read more]

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in…[Read more]

Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of political power provides the impetus for t…[Read more]

This article offers ten reasons, why historians should blog.

In this article, we argue that scholarly blogs are appropriate modern platforms for open access publishing and a dynamic alternative to online journals. We use the blog ‘Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte’ that has become a major player in the field of medieval studies as an example for a successful scholarly blog,…[Read more]

Synopsis of those monasteries that were dissoluted during secularization, from which manuscripts came into possession of the former Court Library of the landgraves of Hessen-Darmstadt (now: University and State Library Darmstadt).

The Vercelli Map, one of the largest maps to survive from the Middle Ages, has not received the attention it merits (Plate IV). This is likely the result of its very poor state of preservation, which has been a constant theme in what little has been published on it.’ There are several studies that make brief mention of the map, and a few studies…[Read more]

In Order to understand what a “global Middle Ages” might be, we need to define “global” in and in relation to the “Middle Ages.” To do so, I turn to medieval (Christian) maps. Their construction of the world-the most, maybe all, others-was founded on inclusion and exclusion. In seeking to construct a global Middle Ages, the authors in this volume…[Read more]