The rotten apple and the good apples: Orthodox,Catholics, and Turks in Philippe de Mézières' crusading propaganda

The late medieval English gentry are now receiving the attention they deserve. The higher levels of gentry society are, however, the usual (though by no means the exclusive) focus of this attention and this tends to make them appear a social caste aloof from their fellows. This article questions whether the upper gentry were very far removed from their social inferiors. It also supports those historians of later medieval England who have questioned the validity of the ‘county community’, a fashionable concept in recent English historiography, if hitherto primarily the hobbyhorse of several seventeenth-century scholars.     

Recovering the histories of women religious in England in the central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin

Building upon the efforts made by scholars over the past 20 years to enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of the literary cultures fostered within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages, this article shows that these women kept their communities' histories and preserved their saints' cults through their own writing. The evidence for this is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracles of the late Anglo-Saxon saint Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the Vita et translatio Edithe, composed c.1080 by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107), and the early fifteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis reveals that the writer of the Chronicle depended on a collection of Edith's and other Wilton saints' miracles that was maintained by their consorors throughout the late tenth and eleventh centuries, independently of Goscelin's account.     

Aristocratic patronage,political networking and the shaping of a private sanctuary: Countess Clemence of Flanders and the early years of Bourbourg Abbey (c.1103–21)

This article discusses the geopolitical manoeuvres of the comital House of Flanders, especially of Countess Clemence of Burgundy, to consolidate comital influence and power in the border region of western Flanders, specifically in the area of Bourbourg. By analysing and mapping the shifting patterns of interaction between alliances of both secular and ecclesiastical stakeholders in the charters issued for the abbey of Bourbourg, a female house, during the first decades of the twelfth century, it argues that the foundation and patronage of Bourbourg were engineered to create a symbolic and geo-strategic key site where the interests of the counts of Flanders and their local representatives, the abbot of Saint-Bertin, and members of the local elite converged, and alliances balanced each other. Moreover, through an anthropological approach in which the charters are also considered within the supra-institutional context of the reform movement, this study offers new insights into the dynamic role of Countess Clemence as a promoter and benefactor of Bourbourg Abbey, and also as a manager of her personal network of allies.