Gender, nation and conquest in the high Middle Ages

Gender, nation and conquest in the high Middle Ages PDF

Author: Susan M. Johns

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-05-16

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1526111101

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Nest of Deheubarth was one of the most notorious women of the Middle Ages, mistress of Henry I and many other men, famously beautiful and strong-willed, object of one of the most notorious abduction/elopements of the period and ancestress of one of the most famous dynasties in medieval Ireland, the Fitzgeralds. This volume sheds light on women, gender, imperialism and conquest in the Middle Ages. From it emerges a picture of a woman who, though remarkable, was not exceptional, representative not of a group of victims or pawns in the dramatic transformations of the high Middle Ages but powerful and decisive actors. The book examines beauty, love, sex and marriage and the interconnecting identities of Nest as wife/concubine/mistress, both at the time and in the centuries since her death, when for Welsh writers and other commentators she has proved a powerful symbol.

Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury

Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury PDF

Author: Kirsten A. Fenton

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1843834006

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William of Malmesbury is one of the most important English historians of the twelfth century -- not only a critical period in English history, but also one that has been recognised as significant in terms of the writing of history and the construction of a national past. This innovative study provides a gendered reading of Malmesbury's works with special reference to the themes of conquest and nation. It considers Malmesbury's presentation of men and women (both lay and religious) through categories based on attributes, such as sexual behaviour and violence, rather than the more familiar `professional' or familial roles, such as warrior and wife. It is also concerned with language and how the topics of conquest and nation are discussed in gendered terms. Importantly, attention is paid to Malmesbury's own position as a post-conquest chronicler, writing at a time of church reform, and to the impact the changes had upon the construction of the stories he narrates. KIRSTEN A. FENTON holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

Gendering the Middle Ages

Gendering the Middle Ages PDF

Author: Pauline Stafford

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 2002-01-21

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780631226512

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A collection in which a group of leading historians of medieval Europe apply a gendered analysis to a series of questions ranging from the transformation of the Roman world and the Christian challenge to late antique masculinity, through canon law and Byzantine coinage to the childhood of medieval visionaries.

Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200

Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200 PDF

Author: Elisabeth Van Houts

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1349275158

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Remembering the past in the Middle Ages is a subject that is usually perceived as a study of chronicles and annals written by monks in monasteries. Following in the footsteps of early Christian historians such as Eusebius and St Augustine, the medieval chroniclers are thought of as men isolated in their monastic institutions, writing about the world around them. As the sole members of their society versed in literacy, they had a monopoly on the knowledge of the past as preserved in learned histories, which they themselves updated and continued. A self-perpetuating cycle of monks writing chronicles, which were read, updated and continued by the next generation, so the argument goes, remained the vehicle for a narrative tradition of historical writing for the rest of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth van Houts forcefully challenges this view and emphasises the collaboration between men and women in the memorial tradition of the Middle Ages through both narrative sources (chronicles, saints' lives and miracles) and material culture (objects such as jewellery, memorial stones and sacred vessels). Men may have dominated the pages of literature from the period, but they would not have had half the stories to write about if women had not told them: thus the remembrance of the past was a human experience shared equally between men and women.

Medieval Royal Mistresses

Medieval Royal Mistresses PDF

Author: Julia A Hickey

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2023-01-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1399081977

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Marriage for Medieval kings was about politics, power and the provision of legitimate heirs. Mistresses were about love, lust and possession. It was a world that included kidnap, poison, murder, violation, public shaming and accusations of witchcraft. Ambition and quick wits as well as beauty were essential attributes for any royal mistress. Infamy, assassination and imprisonment awaited some royal mistresses who tumbled from favour while others disappeared into obscurity or respectable lives as married women and were quickly forgotten. Meet Nest of Wales, born in turbulent times, whose abduction started a war; Alice Perrers and Jane Shore labelled ‘whores’ and ‘wantons’; Katherine Swynford who turned the medieval world upside down with a royal happy-ever-after and Rosamund Clifford who left history and stepped into legend. Discover how serial royal womanisers married off their discarded mistresses to bind their allies close. Explore the semi-official roles of some mistresses; the illegitimate children who became kings; secret marriage ceremonies; Edith Forne Sigulfson and Lady Eleanor Talbot who sought atonement through religion as well as the aristocratic women who became the victims of royal lust. Most of the shameful women who shared the beds of medieval kings were silenced, besmirched or consigned to the footnotes of a patriarchal worldview but they negotiated paths between the private and public spheres of medieval court life - changing history as they went.

Medieval Wales c.1050-1332

Medieval Wales c.1050-1332 PDF

Author: David Stephenson

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1786833883

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After outlining conventional accounts of Wales in the High Middle Ages, this book moves to more radical approaches to its subject. Rather than discussing the emergence of the March of Wales from the usual perspective of the ‘intrusive’ marcher lords, for instance, it is considered from a Welsh standpoint explaining the lure of the March to Welsh princes and its contribution to the fall of the native principality of Wales. Analysis of the achievements of the princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries focuses on the paradoxical process by which increasingly sophisticated political structures and a changing political culture supported an autonomous native principality, but also facilitated eventual assimilation of much of Wales into an English ‘empire’. The Edwardian conquest is examined and it is argued that, alongside the resultant hardship and oppression suffered by many, the rising class of Welsh administrators and community leaders who were essential to the governance of Wales enjoyed an age of opportunity. This is a book that introduces the reader to the celebrated and the less well-known men and women who shaped medieval Wales.

Seals and Society

Seals and Society PDF

Author: Phillipp R. Schofield

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 1783168730

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considers seals from medieval Wales and neighbouring England (the Borders) the market goes beyond Wales ground-breaking treatment of seals as historical documents Has a multidisciplinary scope, covering Art history, Cultural history, Celtic Studies and medieval history uses sigillographic evidence to provide important new insights into the history of medieval Wales and the English border counties

Kings, Usurpers, and Concubines in the 'Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles'

Kings, Usurpers, and Concubines in the 'Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles' PDF

Author: R. Andrew McDonald

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-09-26

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 3030220265

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This Palgrave Pivot explores the representation of sea kings, sinners, and saints in the mid-thirteenth century Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles, the single most important text for the history of the kingdoms of Man and the Isles, c.1066-1300. The focus of the Chronicles on the power struggles, plots and intrigues within the ruling dynasties of Man and the Isles offers an impressive array of heroes and villains. The depiction of the activities of heroic sea kings like Godred Crovan, tyrannical usurpers like Harald son of Godred Don, and their concubines and wives, as well as local heroes like Saint Maughold, raises important questions concerning the dynamic interactions of power, gender and historical writing in the medieval Kingdoms of Man and the Isles, and provide new insights into the significance of the text that is our most important source of information on these ‘Forgotten Kingdoms’ of the medieval British Isles.

Joan, Lady of Wales

Joan, Lady of Wales PDF

Author: Danna R Messer

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2020-09-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1526729326

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The history of women in medieval Wales before the English conquest of 1282 is one largely shrouded in mystery. For the Age of Princes, an era defined by ever-increased threats of foreign hegemony, internal dynastic strife and constant warfare, the comings and goings of women are little noted in sources. This misfortune touches even the most well-known royal woman of the time, Joan of England (d. 1237), the wife of Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd, illegitimate daughter of King John and half-sister to Henry III. With evidence of her hand in thwarting a full scale English invasion of Wales to a notorious scandal that ended with the public execution of her supposed lover by her husband and her own imprisonment, Joan’s is a known, but little-told or understood story defined by family turmoil, divided loyalties and political intrigue. From the time her hand was promised in marriage as the result of the first Welsh-English alliance in 1201 to the end of her life, Joan’s place in the political wranglings between England and the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd was a fundamental one. As the first woman to be designated Lady of Wales, her role as one a political diplomat in early thirteenth-century Anglo-Welsh relations was instrumental. This first-ever account of Siwan, as she was known to the Welsh, interweaves the details of her life and relationships with a gendered re-assessment of Anglo-Welsh politics by highlighting her involvement in affairs, discussing events in which she may well have been involved but have gone unrecorded and her overall deployment of royal female agency.

Writing Welsh History

Writing Welsh History PDF

Author: Huw Pryce

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 0192692321

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Writing Welsh History is the first book to explore how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been written over the past fifteen hundred years. By analysing and contextualizing a wide range of historical writing, from Gildas in the sixth century to recent global approaches, it opens new perspectives both on the history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh - and thus on the use of the past to articulate national and other identities. The study's broad chronological scope serves to highlight important continuities in interpretations of Welsh history. One enduring preoccupation is Wales's place in Britain. Down to the twentieth century it was widely held that the Welsh were an ancient people descended from the original inhabitants of Britain whose history in its fullest sense ended with Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1282-4, their history thereafter being regarded as an attenuated appendix. However, Huw Pryce shows that such master narratives, based on medieval sources and focused primarily on the period down to 1282, were part of a much larger and more varied historiographical landscape. Over the past century the thematic and chronological range of Welsh history writing has expanded significantly, notably in the unprecedented attention given to the modern period, reflecting broader trends in an increasingly internationalized historical profession as well as the influence of social, economic, and political developments in Wales and elsewhere.