England,France, the papacy and the Flemish succession, 1361-9

International politics in the 1360s were dominated by a diplomatic duel between England and France to secure the marriage of Margaret de Male, only child of the count of Flanders and ‘the richest heiress in christendom’. This struggle ultimately involved every major European power, including the papacy and the Empire, and resulted in wars in areas as far apart as Hainault, Castile and Lombardy. It was eventually won by the French, leaving the English with a bitter resentment both toward the Flemings and, more especially, towards the papacy, which had been instrumental in securing the victory for France.     

Social monsters and the walking dead in William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum

William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum (c.1198) is one of the foremost literary artefacts of the late twelfth century. Contained within Book V are four narratives that detail encounters with the walking dead (‘revenants’). This article contends that the specific placement of these narratives within the Historia encourages the reader to make a metaphysical connection between the activities of the revenant and the conduct of social malcontents. The paper analyses the medieval concept of monstrousness and the cultural context of the Historia’s creation, and argues that learned theories of disease causation underscored the base narratology of the four revenant encounters. Following an appraisal of the unrest caused by Williams FitzOsbert and Longchamp, as well as the kings of England and France, the paper concludes by evaluating the ways in which their social monstrosity was encapsulated by the destabilising and destructive tendencies of the walking corpse.     

The Norman Conquest of the classical past: William of Poitiers,language and history

William of Poitiers' Gesta Guillelmi, written shortly after the Norman Conquest of England, remains surprisingly neglected, especially by historians. He is generally regarded primarily as a classical stylist who employed classical references to decorate his panegyric of William of Normandy. Poitiers' use of classical allusion was, however, far from superficial. In arguing for William’s legitimacy as king of England, Poitiers addresses a wider audience than is generally acknowledged, and appeals directly to the fears, expectations and values of his day. The article examines his three most sustained allusions to classical heroes of naval enterprises and conquest – Caesar, Aeneas and Theseus – as key components of the memory of the Norman Conquest, demonstrating that each allusion makes a specific moral and political point. Poitiers is a case study for medieval authorial ingenuity in applying classicism to the problems of the present.     

Parliament in print: William Caxton and the history of political government in the fifteenth century

This article explores the narrative of parliamentary history in fifteenth-century England, specifically as found in the texts William Caxton printed. It investigates Caxton's approach to history and motivation for choosing texts, his translations and vocabulary, his editorial oversight and his audience. As his confidence in his own skill grew, and as he moved from a continental to an English context, his reading of parliaments changed. Initially it corresponded to his French texts, but by the early 1480s he understood the term ‘parliament’ to mean some variation of the contemporary English Parliament. Caxton's later understanding is reflected in the histories he published. This article emphasises the importance of Caxton's historical narratives to Parliament's legitimacy and to political discourse in a time when few parliaments were held.     

Criticism of Henry II's expedition to Ireland in William of Canterbury's miracles of St Thomas Becket

The long collection of miracles of St Thomas Becket written by William, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, between 1172 and c.1179 is, like many other examples of the genre, a rich source for attitudes towards sanctity, relics, and pilgrimage. A far more unusual feature of William's text is the author's criticism of the recent English presence in Ireland. William's comments on this score amount to a loaded stretching of the normal parameters of his textual medium, resulting in an evaluative engagement with current affairs of the sort that we would more normally associate with reflective forms of history-writing. William's criticism focused in particular upon the expedition to Ireland undertaken by King Henry II (October 1171–April 1172), inverting the very rhetoric that Henry had used to justify his Irish adventure. William was not himself Irish, as has sometimes been supposed, nor was he registering his institution's frustrations about its exclusion from the new ecclesiastical order in Ireland, as might be implied by the traditional but questionable ‘Canterbury plot’ interpretation of the much-debated papal bull Laudabiliter. Instead, William was skilfully engaging with current debates about the rectitude of Henry II's Irish expedition, and more broadly contesting emerging prejudices about England's ‘uncultivated’ neighbours, in order to effect a subtle critique of the king's involvement in Becket's murder.     

King Stephen,the English church,and a female mystic: Christina of Markyate's Vita as a neglected source for the council of Winchester (August 1139) and its aftermath

One of the central reasons for the disintegration of royal authority (sometimes called ‘the Anarchy’) during the reign of King Stephen of England is generally thought to have been his troubled relationship with the English church. The king was summoned to appear before the legate in England, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (who was also Stephen's brother), at a church council called for Winchester on 29 August 1139, in order to show cause for his conduct in arresting several prominent bishops and in confiscating their property. Several major chroniclers discuss the events leading up to and occurring at the council of Winchester, especially William of Malmesbury in his Historia novella and the anonymous Gesta Stephani. The versions of events contained in these sources are not entirely consistent. The present paper examines yet another recounting of the events of the council, seldom appreciated by historians of twelfth-century England, presented in the Vita of Christina of Markyate (c.1096/98–c.1155/66), composed by an anonymous monk of St Albans between 1140 and 1146. Christina was close to the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorham, who was probably the patron of the Vita and who quite likely attended the Winchester council and apparently became involved in its aftermath. These events are recorded in some detail in the Vita, presenting us with a vivid recounting of the council and the immediate consequences thereof. The narrative of the Vita contains a somewhat different picture of the personalities and occurrences surrounding the Winchester council than we encounter in the chronicles. The current essay compares the Vita to the standard accounts. We argue that the Vita may be the earliest and possibly most reliable source for the events of the council. Moreover, if we privilege the report of the Vita, the council becomes an especially significant moment in the breakdown of relations between Stephen and the English church.     

King Stephen,the English church,and a female mystic: Christina of Markyate's Vita as a neglected source for the council of Winchester (August 1139) and its aftermath

One of the central reasons for the disintegration of royal authority (sometimes called ‘the Anarchy’) during the reign of King Stephen of England is generally thought to have been his troubled relationship with the English church. The king was summoned to appear before the legate in England, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (who was also Stephen's brother), at a church council called for Winchester on 29 August 1139, in order to show cause for his conduct in arresting several prominent bishops and in confiscating their property. Several major chroniclers discuss the events leading up to and occurring at the council of Winchester, especially William of Malmesbury in his Historia novella and the anonymous Gesta Stephani. The versions of events contained in these sources are not entirely consistent. The present paper examines yet another recounting of the events of the council, seldom appreciated by historians of twelfth-century England, presented in the Vita of Christina of Markyate (c.1096/98–c.1155/66), composed by an anonymous monk of St Albans between 1140 and 1146. Christina was close to the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorham, who was probably the patron of the Vita and who quite likely attended the Winchester council and apparently became involved in its aftermath. These events are recorded in some detail in the Vita, presenting us with a vivid recounting of the council and the immediate consequences thereof. The narrative of the Vita contains a somewhat different picture of the personalities and occurrences surrounding the Winchester council than we encounter in the chronicles. The current essay compares the Vita to the standard accounts. We argue that the Vita may be the earliest and possibly most reliable source for the events of the council. Moreover, if we privilege the report of the Vita, the council becomes an especially significant moment in the breakdown of relations between Stephen and the English church.     

From practice to theory to practice: William Penn from prison to the founding of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for toleration in Restoration England. The broader political theory that Penn articulated in England and attempted to realize in Pennsylvania contained economic, political, social, legal, and religious components, worked out in drafts of founding documents over the course of many months. But the foundation of that theory – its unshakeable commitment to liberty of conscience, its faith in juries as a potential restraint on the arbitrary exercise of power by civil governors, its unsteady mix of principled and pragmatic underpinnings – was laid in Penn’s early years as a Quaker, intertwined with his experiences of imprisonment in England and Ireland. In a very real sense, then, the road to Pennsylvania, for Penn, began in the Cork prison 15 years before he set foot in America.     

Anglo-Saxon women and the law

Scholarly investigations of Anglo-Saxon social history have usually drawn the conclusion that women during that period enjoyed a favourable position in comparison with their successors in post-Conquest England. The following study aims to qualify this view, by demonstrating that the position of women was more complicated than is usually acknowledged. An examination of the Anglo-Saxon legal documents shows that the position of women varied according to circumstances such as rank, marital status, and geographical location. However, an overall improvement between the early and late period is clear. In fact, this improvement is so considerable that there is a much closer resemblance between the situation obtaining in late Anglo-Saxon England and post-Conquest England than there is between the early and late Anglo-Saxon period. Thus, to describe Anglo-Saxon E England as a time when women enjoyed an independence which they lost as a result of the changes introduced by the Norman Conquest is misleading.     

William of Malmesbury and fortuna

The great Benedictine historian William of Malmesbury has divided scholarly interpretation over recent decades. For some, William was a precocious scholarly talent who steered around or subverted the constraining absurdities of the providential orthodoxy. For others, his explicit expressions of faith in God’s providence, despite its often vexatious reverses, betray a sincere piety and reverence for the hidden justice of divine cosmic rationality. These conclusions have relied on flawed assessments of William’s use of the term fortuna, fortune. They adhere to a broader status quo that imagines all medieval thinkers took for granted that fortune’s reverses were inscrutable and inevitable. On the contrary, this article argues that William was concerned with determining the precise causes of fortune, so that he might prescribe ethical advice to prevent its reverses. This has consequences for understanding the ends of twelfth-century historical writing and the development of thought pertaining to individual and collective punishments.     

Byzantine-Muslim conspiracies against the crusades: history and myth

This article examines Latin allegations of Byzantine-Muslim conspiracies against the crusades in the course of the twelfth century, the charges surviving in various chronicles, reports and letters. While their sensational elements have been noted, the Latin accounts portraying Byzantine rulers as allies of the ‘infidels’ against the crusades and the crusader states have generally been taken more or less at face value by modern scholars. A closer examination discloses how these allegations of Byzantine-Muslim collusion were based on rumour, which mainly evolved and flourished among the rank and file of the crusader armies. They eventually found their way into the chronicles, having become more outlandish in transmission. The functions they fulfilled ranged from creating a scapegoat for the failures of the Crusade of 1101 and Second Crusade, to interpretation and explanation, or rather misinterpretation, in the case of the Third Crusade. Despite the fact that, in general, these theories do not seem to have appealed to Latin emperors, kings, and nobles, paradoxically it was a noble of the Fourth Crusade, Baldwin IX of Flanders, together with his clerical advisers, who finally exploited them in May and June 1204 in order to justify the Latin conquest of Christian Constantinople.     

Blood-brothers: a ritual of friendship and the construction of the imagined barbarian in the middle ages

This article analyses the history of blood-covenants in the middle ages. Appearing in various historiographical and literary texts from antiquity onwards, these covenants have hitherto mostly been interpreted by modern authors as a typical feature of pre-modern or even ‘primitive’ societies. A closer inquiry into the context of the existing source-material reveals, however, that this motif can be characterised as a part of discriminatory narrative strategies which aim at the exclusion of foreign and non-Christian cultures. The analysis of the medieval texts, which were mainly produced from the twelfth century onwards, clearly shows a tendency to attribute this ritual of blood-brotherhood either to representatives of the so-called ‘Saracens’ or allegedly heterodox cultures, like the Byzantines or the Irish, which populated the margins of the Latin west. Not only does this topical use of the motif invalidate part of the texts' factual source value, but it also proved misleading for the interpretation of pre-modern societies by modern historians. While an older tradition of classical political history mainly tended to note the ritual as a cultural curiosity, more recent studies of ritual structures are in danger of misrepresenting the cultures they focus on.     

Sovereignty,mercy, and natural law: King James VI/I and Jean Bodin

ABSTRACT

The affinities between Jean Bodin's and King James VI/I's political theories have been recognized, and the fact that James had owned Bodin's Six livres de la république has been recorded, but Bodin's specific influence on James has remained nebulous. This article examines the evidence for James's direct engagement with Bodin, by studying James's copy of the Six livres alongside James's political treatises. It provides substantial new archival evidence for Bodin's influence on James's political thought and, thereby, on Scottish and English theories of sovereignty.     

Squaring the Shield: William Ridgeway's Two Models of Early Greece

From the early 1880s the Cambridge-trained classicist William Ridgeway had applied cutting-edge anthropological theory to his reading of ancient Greek literature in order to develop an evolutionary account of the continuous development of early Greek social institutions. Then, at the turn of the century, he began to argue that archaeological evidence demonstrated that the Achaean warriors described by Homer were in origin Germanic tribesmen from north of the Alps who had but recently conquered Mycenaean Greece. The present paper inquires as to how Ridgeway reconciled these seemingly opposed visions of early Greek society. A fairly comprehensive survey of his writings leads to the suggestion that, in Ridgeway's opinion, Achaean invasion had left little lasting impact upon most early Greek social institutions, but that it had been responsible for a fundamental shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, and that this shift was the key to the subsequent greatness of Greek—and so ultimately Western—civilisation.     

英藏、中藏西夏文《明咒母王大孔雀经》残片补正

《英藏黑水城文献》中有很多《明咒母王大孔雀经》内容的残片,已经定名为《种咒王荫大孔雀经》的残片共有7件,其中名实相符的共有5件。本文在参照俄藏西夏文《明咒母王大孔雀经》的基础之上,在《英藏黑水城文献》当中新定名了 14件《明咒母王大孔雀经》残片,有些残片可进行缀合。此外,对中藏中错定的《佛母大孔雀明王经》残页进行了更正。     

宋代纪传、编年二体优劣论

中唐以后的史家开始重视史学褒贬人事、惩恶劝善的宗旨,编年体史书由此中兴,历史上的二体优劣之争再起。及至北宋,孙甫强调编年体具有体正、文简的优点。体正,指编年体便于立褒贬以惩劝,同时起源较早,与儒家经典关系密切;文简则是指编年体史文简约。孙甫的观点得到宋代多数论者的响应。同时,宋代史学考察重心由人到事的转移,也对编年体史书占据史学主流地位推波助澜。以上因素最终导致了编年体史书空前繁荣的局面。