Marriage in Medieval England
Marriage in Medieval England

Author: Conor McCarthy

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781843831020

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A survey of attitudes to marriage as represented in medieval legal and literary texts. Medieval marriage has been widely discussed, and this book gives a brief and accessible overview of an important subject. It covers the entire medieval period, and engages with a wide range of primary sources, both legal and literary. It draws particular attention to local English legislation and practice, and offers some new readings of medieval English literary texts, including Beowulf, the works of Chaucer, Langland's Piers Plowman, the Book of Margery Kempe and the Paston Letters. Focusing on a number of key themes important across the period, individual chapters discuss the themes of consent, property, alliance, love, sex, family, divorce and widowhood. CONOR MCCARTHY gained his PhD from Trinity College Dublin.

Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England
Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England

Author: Tim Thornton

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9781843832591

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Thornton also sheds light on areas where popular culture and politics were uneasily interlinked: the powerful political influence of those outside elite groups; the variations in political culture across the country; and the considerable continuing power of mystical, supernatural, and 'non-rational' ideas in British social and political life into the nineteenth century."--Jacket.

John Hawkwood
John Hawkwood

Author: William Caferro

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-04-24

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0801888808

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Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute Notorious for his cleverness and daring, John Hawkwood was the most feared mercenary in early Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkwood began his career in France during the Hundred Years' War and crossed into Italy with the famed White Company in 1361. From that time until his death in 1394, Hawkwood fought throughout the peninsula as a captain of armies in times of war and as a commander of marauding bands during times of peace. He achieved international fame, and city-states constantly tried to outbid each other for his services, for which he received money, land, and, in the case of Florence, citizenship—a most unusual honor for an Englishman. When Hawkwood died, the Florentines buried him with great ceremony in their cathedral, an honor denied their greatest poet, Dante. William Caferro's ambitious account of Hawkwood is both a biography and a study of warfare and statecraft. Caferro has mined more than twenty archives in Britain and Italy, creating an authoritative portrait of Hawkwood as an extraordinary military leader, if not always an admirable human being.

The Carmelites and Antiquity
The Carmelites and Antiquity

Author: Andrew Jotischky

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2002-07-18

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780191542503

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The Carmelites, the only contemplative religious order to have been founded in the Crusader States, first emerged as a group of hermits living on Mount Carmel, a site associated with the prophet Elijah. Soon after migrating to the West, in the mid-thirteenth century, they began to develop the geographical associations into a complex historical tradition based on the claim to have been founded by the prophet. Carmelite historical myths were first developed as a response to the threat of suppression, but increasingly came to form the basis of a distinctive ecclesiology and mission. This book, which is the first full-length study of the Carmelite historical legendary, examines the circumstances under which the traditions were constructed, describes the evolution of the traditions themselves from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and places them within the wider context of historical writing by religious orders, and attitudes to the past more generally in the later Middle Ages.