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Articles showcasing the fruits of the most recent scholarship in
the field of fourteenth-century studies. The wide-ranging studies
collected here reflect the latest concerns of and trends in
fourteenth-century research, including work on politics, the law,
religion, and chronicle writing. The lively (and controversial)
debate around the death of Edward II, and the brief but eventful
career of John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall, receive detailed
treatment, as does the theory and implementation of both the law of
treason in England and high status execution in Ireland. There is
an investigation of the often overlooked, yet ever present, lesser
parish clergy of pre-Black Death England, along with the notable
connections between Roman remains and craft guild piety in
fourteenth-century York.There are also chapters shedding new light
on fourteenth-century chronicles: one examines the St Albans
chronicle through the prism of chivalric culture, another analyses
the importance of the Chester Annals of 1385-8 in the writing
culture of the Midlands. Introduced with this volume is a new
section on "Notes and Documents"; re-examined here is an
often-cited letter from the reign of Richard II and the
problematic, yet crucial, issue of its authorship and dating. James
Bothwell is Lecturer in Later Medieval History at the University of
Leicester; Gwilym Dodd is Associate Professor of Medieval History
at the University of Nottingham Contributors: Paul Dryburgh, Aine
Foley, Christopher Guyol, Andy King, Jessica Knowles, E. Amanda
McVitty, D.A.L. Morgan, Philip Morgan, David Robinson.
Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval
England, showing the profound effect played by gender. Conflicts
over treason tormented English political society in the later
Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason
was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because
it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings,
their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However,
despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been
no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the
1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of
treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a
tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category,
aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national
identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing
how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the
laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring
body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was
masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour
and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records,
legislation and chronicles, it illuminates the ways in which
cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government
responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender
conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as
well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the
same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from
accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to
transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in
medieval England.
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