Sunday, January 23, 1390 was a day that Ralph Peioun of Wotton (Lincs.)
and his wife most likely never forgot. On this day, their one-year-old son,
Richard, presumably curious and headstrong like most young toddlers his
age, made an unfortunate choice of playthings when he picked up a pair of
shears and wounded himself in the throat, a fatal…[Read more]

When confronted with cases of self-killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a
vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations
of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping
with royal confiscations of a felon’s goods. All of these factors had a profound i…[Read more]

In the year 1397 in the parish of Tuttington (Norfolk), a woman whose
name is lost to history, frantic to rid herself of the evil spirit that
possessed her, turned to suicide. She attempted first to hang herself,
but her husband discovered her while life remained in her body, cut down
the rope, and comforted her. A few weeks later she tried…[Read more]

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…[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 h…[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]

With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate
in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of
women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal
plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by
marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of…[Read more]

In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman
from one of the Anglo-Norman island’smost established and affluent
families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of
today’s youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family
of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left
her pregnant. To Matilda the…[Read more]

In 1234, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) called for a crusade to exterminate heretics in Bosnia, a call that he would repeat in 1238. In this chapter, I argue that the Bosnian crusade(s) of the 1230s was/were launched not against the adherents of a particular doctrine but against a place, one which was thought to be an especial incubator of heretical…[Read more]

This chapter examines how historians of the Franciscan order have created androcentric and teleological histories of the order based on hagiographic narratives of origin, and shows how we might better understand these hagiographic texts as products of the contexts in which they were produced.

In this chapter, I complicate the image of women religious as either authoritative and agentive or submissive and oppressed, with reference to the relationships between royal women, the papacy, and the Franciscan order in Bohemia and the Polish duchies. Using the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century evidence for these relationships, I argue…[Read more]