Medieval History Commons^™

Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren

Medieval Ecocriticisms

Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.

Life And Health Concerns Of A European Monastic Scribe During The 14th Century, Jared Reiling, Christopher O'Neill, Nick Curatolo

2021 Festschrift: The Interpolated Roman de Fauvel in Context

Writing in a quiet, candle-lit room may sound hygge to some, but monks during the 14th century would describe their work on the scriptorium as cold, depressing, tedious, mundane, and exhausting. The copying of all texts, including biblical and musical, was done by hand with monks working around the clock copying, illuminating manuscripts, and binding books. With the regimented schedule of monastic life, the Church worked scribes till exhaustion which created health problems and aggravated underlying conditions. Though cataracts were a common problem, commoners performed surgery on each other to restore sight, but it only made the situation worse.

Do It By The Book - The Development And Manufacturing Of Books In The Middle Ages, Casey Cromp, Annaliese Croasdale, Emma Pilmer, Lauren Diciaula

2021 Festschrift: The Interpolated Roman de Fauvel in Context

This paper discusses the book-making progress in the Middle Ages that was used across Europe. This process includes the making of paper, the making of the inks used, bookbinding, and how books were printed. Each is an important aspect of how early manuscripts were created. Without these processes, there would not be written documentation of early literature or music. This paper provides a deeper understanding of the work that was implemented into creating early books, and gives insight as to what the book-making process consisted of before the development of present-day technologies.

Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance, Irina Dumitrescu, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Introductory essay to volume 57, issue 1 of Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality.

Seeing Red: Visuality, Violence, And The Making Of Textiles In Early Medieval Enigmatic Poetry, Megan Cavell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores a group of thematically related, enigmatic poems in Old English, Anglo-Latin and Old Norse that play with gender through their representations of violent textile production. The tenth-century Exeter Book’s Riddle 56, eighth-century archbishop Tatwine’s Enigmata 11 and 13, and the traditional eddic-style poem Darraðarljóð merge the highly gendered activities of textile production and warfare, questioning binaries and naturalized categories in the process. This process ends with the containment of gender play during the act of solving and interpreting the enigmatic, which restores the status quo. In analysing the space that enigmatic poetry provides for subversive …

Performing Female Sanctity—And Reading It: The Visitatio Sepulchri Of Wilton And Barking Abbey, Sarah Brazil

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article discusses two traditions of the Visitatio Sepulcri enacted by women religious in late medieval England, based on the exceptional surviving documentation of liturgical performances from the abbeys of Barking and Wilton. Although these documents do not give access to what happened in these Easter morning performances, they do provide evidence for how the agency of the nuns was encoded into every aspect of their respective liturgical tradition. One of the most striking dimensions of this agency is that the abbesses and nuns shaped performance practices to conceptions of their embodiment. I explore how each abbey grounded authority within …

Transforming Community: Women’S Rape Narratives And Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Jennifer Garrison

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Despite its reputation as socially and politically conservative, John Gower’s fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis highlights sexual violence against women as a central cultural injustice and presents women’s rape narratives as a potentially powerful force for social and political change. This essay focuses on three of Gower’s tales in which women tell their own rape narratives with dramatic and lasting consequences: Mundus and Paulina, Tarquin and Lucrece, and Tereus and Philomena. In all three instances, these women’s narratives of suffering are socially transformative precisely because they threaten the masculine chivalric ideal. For Gower, rape is a direct result of the cultural belief …

Reconstructing Ita At Schaffhausen, Shirin Fozi

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Nellenburg family looms large in the historical memory of Schaffhausen. Count Eberhard (ca. 1015-1078/1079) and his wife Ita (d. ca. 1105) had transformed the small city with their patronage, most notably through the foundation of the monastery of Allerheiligen; their children held prominent military and ecclesiastical positions across the Lake Constance region. Together with their son Burkhard, his wife Hedwig, and a cousin known as Irmentrud, Eberhard and Ita were buried prominently in Allerheiligen; their collective funerary monument is one of the earliest and most ambitious of its type that is known from the twelfth century. The monument, however, …

Women’S Work And Men’S Devotions: The Fabrics Of The Passion In “O Vernicle”, Jenny C. Bledsoe

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article explores how male Cistercians producing an early fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript made devotional use of images representing women’s textile labor. An early manuscript copy of “O Vernicle,” a Middle English arma Christi poem, appears in Royal 17 A. xxvii, likely produced at Bordesley Abbey. The Royal version of “O Vernicle” features a unique marginal illumination of two women of Bethlehem and Jerusalem wearing green and red dresses. The woman in green holds a baby swaddled in a green and blue cloth with red stripes, similar to a Scottish tartan. Three other examples demonstrate the illuminator’s careful attention to fabric’s …

About The Contributors

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021)

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

A Hive Of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers, Shannon Jane Garner

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

While much important work has been done on the early modern fascination with the political nature of bees and bee societies, this essay instead takes a closer look at the conflation of honeybees, women, and domestic spaces within the multi-generic textual ecology of early modern beekeeping. In the early modern period women were the primary beekeepers. As key participants in this art of sustained and intimate collaboration across species and environment, these women managed their own hives using the multifaceted skills of the early modern housewife, including textile arts, brewing, distilling, medicine, horticulture, and husbandry. This essay highlights the tension …

Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom And The Alleged Incontinence Of Female Speech, Mary C. Flannery

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In a passage from The Castle of Perseverance, the reprehensible Malus Angelus dismisses the speech of the personified virtues who are attempting to lead mankind to salvation: ‘Ther wymmen arn, are many wordys. (…) Ther ges syttyn are many tordys’ (2649-51). As the quotation illustrates, likening someone’s words to turds is both an effective brush-off and a colourful insult. This particular insult derives its force from the familiar anti-feminist trope of the voluble woman: like women, the wicked angel implies, the female personifications of virtue talk too much, and the incontinence of their speech is presented in terms that …

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Space, Image, And Reform In Early Modern Art: The Influence Of Marcia Hall, Arthur J. Difuria, Ian Verstegen

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations …

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose

The Hilltop Review

In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …

Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works, Flora Sophie Lemburg

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper examines the connection between the motif of the Old English warrior woman and Tolkien’s female characters. It provides a critique of Leslie Donovan’s paper “The valkyrie reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien´s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn and Arwen” and contrasts previous research on Tolkien’s female characters focussed either on gender-studies or on a “Germanic” influence with a more direct and specific connection between Medieval English and his works. The motif of the Old English warrior woman is established by investigating the female characters Judith, Elene, and Juliana from the Old English poems Judith, …

The Virago Paradigm Of Female Sanctity: Constructing The Masculine Woman In Medieval Christianity, Angela Bolen

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Latin word virago, in its simplest definition, means “a man-like, warrior woman.” For Christian men and women in the Patristic era and the central Middle Ages, the virago represented a woman who denied all biological characteristics of her womanhood, fiercely protected her virginity, and fully embodied the virtues of Christian masculinity. The virago paradigm of female sanctity, a creation of male writers, reconciled a pervasive fear of the female sex with an obvious admiration for holy women. Additionally, the virago model maintained the supremacy of masculine virtues, upheld a patriarchal hierarchy, and created a metaphorical space that validated …

The Heart Of Academia: Medieval Universities, Textbooks, And The Birth Of Academic Libraries, Christopher Proctor

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The contemporary academic library occupies a crucial role in the teaching and learning mission of universities. This centrality is perhaps best exemplified by the popular saying that the library is the heart of the university. But has this always been the case since the inception of universities in the High Middle Ages? To help answer this question, the following discussion traces the creation of universities within the medieval world, the textual traditions that informed their scholarship and pedagogy, and the later birth of academic libraries within the college and university system. The author attempts to demonstrate that the rise of …

Playing With Fire: The Medieval Judicial Ordeals And Their Downfall, Aaron Larson

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Trials by ordeal in the Middle Ages prove to be some of the most complex secular trials in all of history. Both trial by fire, and trial by water looked to call God's judgment into play, hoping that He would make the decisions of guilt or innocence. God is all-knowing. He is all-powerful. Therefore He has all of the relevant information to determine the fates of those who go through the ordeals. Despite this, the theologians in the medieval Church looked to lessen clerical involvement in the ordeals. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council met, and the ordeals ceased to …

Literacy, Rhetoric, Tradition, And Truth In The Age Of Bede, Gerard A. Lavin Iii

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite his own high level of literacy and education, the Venerable Bede (672/3–735) inhabited a world in which nearly all personal, social, educational, and political discourse was conducted orally. A thorough understanding of his works will require an understanding of this discourse, but attempts to apply broad theories of “orality” derived from other cultures to early medieval England have repeatedly foundered. This dissertation establishes a set of guiding principles to produce a more nuanced and localized model of discourse in Bede’s England and observes a variety of ways oral and literate forms of rhetoric were employed by political actors in …

A Threatening Heresy: Cathar And Protestant Identity Against Catholicism In France Between The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) And The French Wars Of Religion (1562-1598), Jonathan Wright

History ETDs

The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and the French Wars of Religion (1562- 1598) were two of the most violent moments in French history. Both involved the persecution of a perceived minority by Catholic forces, and both left irreparable scars on the area of Occitania in the south of France. Battles along river fronts and the clandestine boat smuggling of heretics were actions undertaken by a heretical Cathar group that confronted orthodox religion. Water became a critical part of the creation of a persecuted minority in Occitania. Intensifying Cathar heresy led to increased violence in the Wars of Religion as Catholic aggression …

Mes 160: Classical Islamic Literature & Civilization, Kirsten Beck

Open Educational Resources

This open resource includes a syllabus, class schedule, grading rubrics, and guidelines/examples for digital poetry annotation.

The course website can be found here: http://mes160.social.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/

In this course, we will take a journey through history, literature, and ideas, traveling through Islamic civilization from 600-1250 CE. We will learn about and contemplate the major events and concerns of Islamic civilization, from the dawn of Islam through the expansions, transformations, and fragmentations of Islamic empires, up until the end of the 13th century. Works of Islamic literature from a variety of genres will fuel our journey. Along the way, we will learn how …

Medieval Infertility: Treatments, Cures, And Consequences, Zia Simpson

The Forum: Journal of History

Since the first civilizations emerged, reproductive ability has been one of the most prominent elements in assessing a woman’s value to society. Other characteristics such as beauty, intelligence, and wealth may have been granted comparable consequence, but those are arbitrary and improvable. Fertility is genetic, and for centuries it was beyond human control. Among the medieval European nobility, fertility held even greater power. The absence of an heir could, either directly or indirectly, bring about war, economic depression, and social disorder. Catholicism provided a refuge by allowing barren women to retain their hopes, while simultaneously enriching Rome’s coffers. Other women …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Lawful Violence: The Relationship Between Marriage And Conflict In The Wars Of The Roses, Hannah R. Keller

Masters Theses

England’s King Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464. Edward’s sister Margaret of York married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468. Both marriages occurred during England’s fifteenth-century conflict, the Wars of the Roses. And both created conflict between Edward, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and France’s King Louis XI. Most historians regard this conflict as either a sign of or product of disorder. I, however, argue that both marriages could have been a calculated form of “lawful” violence known as disworship used to damage the political capital of Warwick and Louis and thereby instigate war with France. …

Thinking Queerly: Medievalism, Wizardry, And Neurodiversity In Young Adult Texts, Jes Battis

Premodern Transgressive Literatures

Why do we love wizards? Where do these magical figures come from? Thinking Queerly traces the wizard from medieval Arthurian literature to contemporary YA adaptations. By exploring the link between Merlin and Harry Potter, or Morgan la Fey and Sabrina, readers will see how the wizard offers spaces of hope and transformation for young readers. In particular, this book examines how wizards think differently, and how this difference can resonate with both LGBTQ and neurodivergent readers, who’ve been told they don’t fit in.

Session 2: Panel 1: Presenter 1 (Paper) -- The Struggle Of The Soul Medieval Women Mystics And The Constraints Of The Orthodoxy, Kasaundra A. Bonanno

Young Historians Conference

First Corinthians 14:34 tells us, “let your women keep silence in the churches for it is not permitted unto them to speak.” But what happened when medieval women in the 12-15th centuries did speak, and what techniques did they apply to gain credibility? This paper explores the various methods (along with cultural aspects such as the appearance of piousness) women mystics utilized to gain power within the Church in a time when their voices were silenced, and the factors that allowed individuals such as Catherine of Siena to gain incredible influence where individuals like Joan of Arc were burned at …

Meddling In The Post-Black Death Economy: Edward Iii’S Policies To Repress The Peasantry, Leah Diciesare, Daniel Melleno

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

The Black Death caused a mass mortality in England, drastically affecting society. However, it was the aftermath of the plague that had the greatest impacts. The loss of life removed pressure on the economy due to population density, which gave the peasants opportunities to improve their lives. But that was a short-lived phenomenon; the peasantry ultimately remained repressed, as they had been prior to the plague. Edward III meddled in the English economy in the wake of the Black Death by introductions price and wage regulations. These efforts were to maintain the status quo in English society so that the …

John Of Damascus’S Theological Methodology: An Effective Way To Answer Islamic Objections, Sherene N. Khouri

Liberty Theological Review

John of Damascus, who is considered one of the three pillars of the Eastern Orthodox church, was not known in the West for a long time. Few scholars studied his work in recent years and highlighted some aspects of his Summa, which is considered the first systematic theology work in the history of Christianity. This paper will have three sections: the first section shall discuss the life and the educational background of John. The second section shall discuss and evaluate John’s theological methodology. The third section shall discuss his methodology in answering the Saracen. This paper aims to highlight …