Revisiting The Medieval North Of England

The medieval north of England has been underexplored to date, and this volume may be seen as an invitation for further exploration. It brings together scholars with shared interests in language, literature, culture, history and manuscript studies, viewed from different disciplinary perspectives such as English philology, historical linguistics and medieval literature. While many scholars have thus far been debating the dividing lines between north and south as well as between north, Midlands and south, the contributors to this volume are interested in texts produced in the north, the providence of which has been determined by way of affiliation to religious and civic writing centres including the important monastic houses in the north (such as Durham, York and the Yorkshire Cistercian houses). Most of the contributions grow out of recent and ongoing research projects that touch upon different aspects of the north of England in the medieval period. Concentrating on the north as a centre of manuscript production, dissemination and reception, this volume aims also at illustrating the fluidity of boundaries and communication, and the resulting links to different geographical regions.

The medieval development of the distinct region of north-east England explored through close examination of landscape, religion and history. The recent surge of interest in the political, ecclesiastical, social and economic history of north-eastern England is reflected in the essays in this volume. The topics covered range widely, including the development of both rural and urban life and institutions. There are contributions on the well-known richness of Durham cathedral muniments, its priory and bishopric, and there is also a particular focus on the institutions and practices which evolved to deal with Scottish border problems. A number of papers broach lesser-known subjects which accordingly offer new territory for exploration, among them the distinctive characteristics of local jurisdiction in the northern counties, the formation of north-eastern landscapes, the course of agrarian development in the region and the emergence of a northern gentry class alongside the better known ecclesiastical and lay magnates. CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY is Lecturer in History at the University of Durham, where R.H. BRITNELL is Emeritus Professor.

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship – imaginative, material, and political – between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.

Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, c. 1100 - c. 1530 offers a broad but detailed study of the practice of devotion to the Name of Jesus in late medieval England. It focuses on key texts written in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English that demonstrate the way in which devotion moved from monastic circles to a lay public in the late medieval period. It argues that devotion to the Name is a core element of Richard Rolle's contemplative practice, although devotion to the Name circulated in trilingual England at an earlier stage. The volume investigates to what extent the 1274 Second Lyon Council had an impact in the spread of the devotion in England, and beyond. It also offers illuminating evidence about how Margery Kempe and her scribes used devotion, how Eleanor Hull made it an essential component of her meditative sequence seven days of the week, and how Lady Margaret Beaufort worked towards its instigation as an official feast.

This book surveys the textual representation of Cuthbert, the premier northern English saint, from the seventh to fifteenth centuries.

During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. Usually associated with the Virgin Mary or the Lady of popular romance, it appeared in myriad literary and iconographic forms, largely for its aesthetic, decorative and symbolic qualities. This study focuses on the more complex metaphysical functions and meanings attached to it between 1100 and 1400 - and, in particular, those associated with the gardens of Eden and the Song of Songs. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender, gardens, landscape and space, it traces specifically the resurfacing and reworking of the idea and image of the enclosed garden within the writings of medieval holy women and other female-coded texts. In so doing, it presents the enclosed garden as generator of a powerfully gendered hermeneutic imprint within the medieval religious imaginary - indeed, as an alternative "language" used to articulate those highly complex female-coded approaches to God that came to dominate late-medieval religiosity. The book also responds to the "eco-turn" in our own troubled times that attempts to return the non-human to the centre of public and private discourse. The texts under scrutiny therefore invite responses as both literary and "garden" spaces where form often reflects content, and where their authors are also diligent "gardeners" the apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, for example; the horticulturally-inflected Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg and the "green" philosophies of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias; the visionary writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn collaborating within their Helfta nunnery; the Middle English poem, Pearl; and multiple reworkings of the deeply problematic and increasingly sexualized garden enclosing the biblical figure of Susanna.

New approaches to religious texts from the Middle Ages, highlighting their diversity and sophistication.

This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including the spiritual guidance text, Life of Christ, and collection of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.