Download or read book Marriage Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London written by Shannon McSheffrey and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2006-07-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association How were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary evidence from both the ecclesiastical court system and the records of city and royal government, as well as advice manuals, chronicles, moral tales, and liturgical texts, Shannon McSheffrey focuses her study on England's largest city in the second half of the fifteenth century. Marriage was a religious union—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and imbued with deep spiritual significance—but the marital unit of husband and wife was also the fundamental domestic, social, political, and economic unit of medieval society. As such, marriage created political alliances at all levels, from the arena of international politics to local neighborhoods. Sexual relationships outside marriage were even more complicated. McSheffrey notes that medieval Londoners saw them as variously attributable to female seduction or to male lustfulness, as irrelevant or deeply damaging to society and to the body politic, as economically productive or wasteful of resources. Yet, like marriage, sexual relationships were also subject to control and influence from parents, relatives, neighbors, civic officials, parish priests, and ecclesiastical judges. Although by medieval canon law a marriage was irrevocable from the moment a man and a woman exchanged vows of consent before two witnesses, in practice marriage was usually a socially complicated process involving many people. McSheffrey looks more broadly at sex, governance, and civic morality to show how medieval patriarchy extended a far wider reach than a father's governance over his biological offspring. By focusing on a particular time and place, she not only elucidates the culture of England's metropolitan center but also contributes generally to our understanding of the social mechanisms through which premodern European people negotiated their lives.

Download or read book Marriage Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London written by Shannon McSheffrey and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association How were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary evidence from both the ecclesiastical court system and the records of city and royal government, as well as advice manuals, chronicles, moral tales, and liturgical texts, Shannon McSheffrey focuses her study on England's largest city in the second half of the fifteenth century. Marriage was a religious union—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and imbued with deep spiritual significance—but the marital unit of husband and wife was also the fundamental domestic, social, political, and economic unit of medieval society. As such, marriage created political alliances at all levels, from the arena of international politics to local neighborhoods. Sexual relationships outside marriage were even more complicated. McSheffrey notes that medieval Londoners saw them as variously attributable to female seduction or to male lustfulness, as irrelevant or deeply damaging to society and to the body politic, as economically productive or wasteful of resources. Yet, like marriage, sexual relationships were also subject to control and influence from parents, relatives, neighbors, civic officials, parish priests, and ecclesiastical judges. Although by medieval canon law a marriage was irrevocable from the moment a man and a woman exchanged vows of consent before two witnesses, in practice marriage was usually a socially complicated process involving many people. McSheffrey looks more broadly at sex, governance, and civic morality to show how medieval patriarchy extended a far wider reach than a father's governance over his biological offspring. By focusing on a particular time and place, she not only elucidates the culture of England's metropolitan center but also contributes generally to our understanding of the social mechanisms through which premodern European people negotiated their lives.

Download or read book Marriage Family and Law in Medieval Europe written by Michael M. Sheehan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by Michael Sheehan, whose work and interpretation on medieval property, marriage, family, sexuality, and law has insprired scholars for 40 years.

Download or read book The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England written by Beth Allison Barr and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close examination of religious texts illuminates the way in which parish priests dealt with their female parishioners in the middle ages.

Download or read book Authority Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England written by Susan Broomhall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

Download or read book Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany written by Jamie Page and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on legal case studies, this book focuses on how gender discourse shaped the lives of prostitutes in medieval Germany.

Download or read book Law in Common written by Tom Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law in Common draws on a large body of unpublished archival material from local archives and libraries across the country, to show how ordinary people in the later Middle Ages - such as peasants, craftsmen, and townspeople - used law in their everyday lives, developing our understanding of the operation of late-medieval society and politics.

Download or read book The Learned and Lived Law written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-10-21 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging collection of essays reflects the manifold scholarly interests of legal historian Charles Donahue, whose former students engage here with questions related to foundational Roman law concepts, the impact of the law on women and families in medieval and early modern Europe, the intersection of law and religion, and the echoes of legal ideas on later developments in American law and in world literature and philosophy. From the monks of Metz to the book sellers of colonial Boston, from fourteenth-century English charters to the writings of Faust, these essays invite you to experience law at once learned and lived. Contributors are: Charles Bartlett, Anton Chaevitch, Wim Decock, Rowan Dorin, Sally E. Hadden, Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Nikitas E. Hatzimihail, Samantha Kahn Herrick, Daniel Jacobs, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Amalia D. Kessler, Saskia Lettmaier, Sara McDougall, Stuart M. McManus, Elizabeth W. Mellyn, Bharath Palle, Ryan Rowberry, Carol Symes, James R. Townshend, and John Witte, Jr.

Download or read book Marriage Separation and Divorce in England 1500 1700 written by K. J. Kesselring and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

Download or read book Anne of Bohemia written by Kristen L. Geaman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the life of Anne of Bohemia, the first queen of Richard II (1377–1399), and situates her within the context of medieval queenship by arguing that Anne ably fulfilled the political role of the queen consort through her intercession, patronage, and piety. Much previous scholarship on Anne has focused on her relationship with famous poets, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, but from analyzing government documents it becomes clear that Anne used her wealth and status to enact power. Through financial, religious, and cultural patronage, Anne rewarded supporters and servants and influenced court life. The examination of sources such as a letter from Anne to her half brother, and an apothecary bill that contains some fertility medicines suggests that the queen both desired and tried to have children. As such, the volume questions the public imagination of Anne and shows that, in this example, although she died childless, Anne and Richard attempted to have children throughout their marriage. With the inclusion of tables listing Anne’s acts of intercession and her land holdings and land grants, Anne of Bohemia is a useful tool for students and scholars interested in queenship studies, medieval women’s history, and the history of the English monarchy.

Download or read book Conflicts Confessions and Contracts written by Elizabeth Hardman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diocesan Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Carpentras uses notarial records from the 1480s to reconstruct the procedures, caseload, and sanctions of the bishop’s court of Carpentras and compare them to other secular and ecclesiastical courts. The court provided a robust forum for debt litigation utilized by a wide variety of people. Its criminal proceedings focused on recidivist clerics who engaged in fights, disobedience, anti-Jewish activities, and sexual transgressions. Its justice varied depending on whether cases involved violence, sex, or contracts. The judge applied sanctions gingerly and protected litigants’ rights carefully, in ways we might not expect: his role was to intervene in, explore, and document conflicts, and to elicit confessions and mediate disputes. Participants exploited this narrative and archival space well.

Download or read book Christ the Physician in Late Medieval Religious Controversy written by Patrick Outhwaite and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings. Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of literature, sermons, and medical texts, it shows that Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia used concepts developed in hospital settings to press for increased lay access to Scripture and the sacraments against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Tracing a story of reform and controversy from localised institutional contexts to two of the most important pan-European councils of the fifteenth century, Constance and Basel, it argues that at a point when the body of the Church was strained by multiple popes, heretics and schismatics, the allegory came into increasing use to restore health and order.

Download or read book The Good Women of the Parish written by Katherine L. French and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was immense social and economic upheaval between the Black Death and the English Reformation, and contemporary writers often blamed this upheaval on immorality, singling out women's behavior for particular censure. Late medieval moral treatises and sermons increasingly connected good behavior for women with Christianity, and their failure to conform to sin. Katherine L. French argues, however, that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities. Scholarship on medieval women's religious experiences has focused primarily on elite women, nuns, and mystics who either were literate enough to leave written records of their religious ideas and behavior or had access to literate men who did this for them. Most women, however, were not literate, were not members of religious orders, and did not have private confessors. As The Good Women of the Parish shows, the great majority of women practiced their religion in a parish church. By looking at women's contributions to parish maintenance, the ways they shaped the liturgy and church seating arrangements, and their increasing opportunities for collective action in all-women's groups, the book argues that gendered behavior was central to parish life and that women's parish activities gave them increasing visibility and even, on occasion, authority. In the face of demands for silence, modesty, and passivity, women of every social status used religious practices as an important source of self-expression, creativity, and agency.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature written by Candace Barrington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the interrelationship between law and literature in Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Tudor England.

Download or read book Honor Vengeance and Social Trouble written by Peter Arnade and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the more intriguing documentary sources from late medieval Europe are pardon letters—petitions sent by those condemned for serious crimes to monarchs and princes in France and the Low Countries in the hopes of receiving a full pardon. The fifteenth-century Burgundian Low Countries and duchy of Burgundy produced a large cache of these petitions, from both major cities (Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Dijon) and rural communities. In Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble, Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier present the first study in English of these letters to explore and interrogate the boundaries between these sources' internal, discursive properties and the social world beyond the written text.Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble takes the reader out onto the streets and into the taverns, homes, and workplaces of the Burgundian territories, charting the most pressing social concerns of the day: everything from family disputes and vendettas to marital infidelity and property conflicts—and, more generally, the problems of public violence, abduction and rape, and the role of honor and revenge in adjudicating disputes. Arnade and Prevenier examine why the right to pardon was often enacted by the Burgundian dukes and how it came to compete with more traditional legal means of resolving disputes. In addition, they consider the pardon letter as a historical source, highlighting the limitations and pitfalls of relying on documents that are, by their very nature, narratives shaped by the petitioner to seek a favored outcome. The book also includes a detailed case study of a female actress turned prostitute.An example of microhistory at its best, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble will challenge scholars while being accessible to students in courses on medieval and early modern Europe or on historiography.

Download or read book Romance s Rival written by Talia Schaffer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea. Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction. Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.

Download or read book Daily Life in Chaucer s England written by Jeffrey L. Forgeng and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the medieval world firsthand in this indispensable hands-on resource, and examine life as it was actually lived. The first book on medieval England to arise out of the living history movement, this volume allows readers to understand-and, if possible, recreate-what life was like for ordinary people in the days of Geoffrey Chaucer. Readers will learn not only what types of games medieval Britons played, what clothes they wore, or what food they ate, but actual rules for games, clothing patterns, and recipes. Written with impeccable detail, this volume examines all aspects of life in medieval England, down to basic fundamentals like nutrition, waste management, and table manners. Parallel situations and quoted material from The Canterbury Tales draw direct connections to Chaucer's work. Student researchers will benefit from a multitude of resources, including primary source sidebars, a chapter on online resources and digital research, information on medieval reenactments, a timeline of events, a glossary of terms, numerous illustrations, and a comprehensive print and nonprint bibliography of accessible sources. Supporting the world history curriculum and offering an interactive supplement to literature curricula, this volume is a must-have for students and interested readers. Detailed and meticulous, this volume examines all aspects of life in medieval England, down to basic fundamentals like nutrition, waste management, and table manners. Readers will explore, seasons, holidays and holy days, the prevalence and normalcy of death, the average workday, crafts and trade, decorating practices, and recreational activities like archery and falconry. Parallel situations and quoted material from The Canterbury Tales also draw direct connections to Chaucer's work.