Essays illuminate a wide range of topics from the Middle Ages, from the seals of an empress to priests' wives and the undead. This volume of the Haskins Society Journal demonstrates the Society's continued engagement with historical and interdisciplinary research from the early to the central Middle Ages on a broad range of topics including militarism, piety, the miraculous and the monstrous. Chapters explore material culture through a mythic eleventh-century papal banner and the seals and coins of the Empress Matilda; offer new insights into Carolingian hagiography and into the undead in the Historia rerum Anglicarum. Further chapters feature new evidence on the role of priests' wives, the tensions of multiple lordships, shifting identities in the Irish Sea world, and the didactic use of royal anger. A fresh examination of Aelred of Rievaulx's Relatio de Standaro and a re-assessment of Flemish documentary practice continue the Haskins Society's commitment to primary source analysis. Two essays on the thirteenth century, including links between Crusade spirituality and lay penitential strategies and an investigation into the economic costs of waging war, round out the volume. Contributors: DAN ARMSTRONG, DAVID S. BACHRACH, DANIEL M. BACHRACH, JILLIAN M. BJERKE, HANNAH BOSTON, MARIAH COOPER, FIONA J. GRIFFITHS, JESSE M. HARRINGTON, JEAN-FRANCOIS NIEUS, ALICE RIO, CHARITY URBANSKI, PATRICK WADDEN, MEGHAN WOOLLEY, LU ZUO

Study of the Norman World's borders, frontiers, and boundaries in Europe, shedding fresh light on their nature and extent. The Normans exerted great influence across Christendom and beyond in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Figures like William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard subdued vast territories, their feats recorded for posterity by chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey Malaterra. Through travel and conquest, the Normans encountered, created, and conceptualised many borders, with the areas of Europe that they ruled and most affected often being grouped together as the "Norman World". This volume examines the nature, forms, and function of borders in and around this "Norman World", looking at Normandy, the British-Irish Isles, and Southern Italy. Three sections frame the collection. The first concerns physical features, from broad frontier expanses, to rivers and walls that were both literally and metaphorically lines of division. The second shows how borders were established, contested, and negotiated between the papacy and lay rulers and senior churchmen. Finally, the third highlights the utility of conceptual frontiers for both medieval authors and modern historians. Among the subjects covered are Archbishop Anselm's travels across Christendom; the portrayal of borders in the writings of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Gerald of Wales; and the limits of Norman seigneurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.

Growing up, author Dan Armstrong dreamed of becoming an FBI agent or a police officer. He hadn't considered working as a cable guy. He didn't know it was a profession. But when he was twenty years old, Armstrong began working for his local cable television company and hasn't looked back. In The Adventures of a Real-Life Cable Guy, Armstrong recounts his experiences with dozens of characters, stories gathered during his thirty-year career-from the hilarious and the horrifying to the happy and the heartbreaking. He's serviced a million-dollar mansion and a five-hundred dollar trailer on the same day. He's been in homes where the cats outnumbered the humans. He's saved a man's life. And he was the last to see someone alive. Praise for The Adventures of a Real-Life Cable Guy "It's always fun to read the insights into other worlds where we will never travel. Reading The Adventures of a Real-Life Cable Guy is a great collection of humorous and fun stories ..." -Ron White, Two-Time USA Memory Champion