Gender and Sanctity in the Middle Ages

This review essay examines recent trends and developments in the study of medieval sanctity and gender, looking at the range of approaches which have been and are being taken by both historians and literary scholars to a wide variety of hagiographic texts. Two recent studies of medieval hagiography are reviewed, John Kitchen, Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography and the collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters edited by Catherine Mooney. These works are representative of differing approaches to the issue of male authors' representations of female sanctity and concomitant issues of gender ideology.     

Framing papal communication in the central Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the production and consumption of papal communication in the central Middle Ages. It outlines the development of the papacy, which formed the historical and political framework for papal communication, and discusses the processes, themes and meanings behind various types of communication relating to the papacy in Latin Christendom principally between the years 1100 and 1300. Particular emphasis is placed upon the plurality of responses to papal communication and on the relationship between papal communication and authority, and papal self-identity and perceptions. The essay introduces seven diverse and interdisciplinary articles in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the papacy and communication in the central Middle Ages.     

Usages of Domestic Life in the Middle Ages

This paper is based on the lecture given to the Institute at the Society of Antiquaries of London on 18 October 1972. It concerns the discovery in 1967 in a house in the village of Harwell of the aisled hall, formerly in the curia of the medieval manor of the Bishop of Winchester, for which the Pipe Rolls for most of the years from 1208 to 1450 exist. The earliest phase of which parts survive consisted of a framed building with passing-braces built in the twelfth or early thirteenth century. The evolution of this form of timber dwelling with oak is traced from continental, probably lower Rhineland, structures of the ninth and tenth centuries. The long timbers used as passing braces are likely to have been derived from buildings in southern Germany which used conifers such as fir, timber that in turn had a long history from Roman times.