You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Essays on the cultures of England and Normandy in the period after the Norman Conquest.
The essays in this book have as their theme Tradition and Change. They view institutions, groups and individuals responding and adjusting to changes in their world, whether in religious discipline or in the needs of government. They also explore the continuity of traditions in both ecclesiastical and secular society and trace how changes themselves crystallize into the traditions of the future. The topics chosen to illustrate this general theme reflect the wide interests of the honorand, whose publications, including her edition of the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, have illuminated the twin cultures of England and Normandy and their joint influence on European society in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
In the Middle Ages writers were still deeply involved in the legal and linguistic consequences of the Norman victory. Later, the issues became directly relevant to debates about constitutional rights; the theory of a "Norman yoke" provided first a call for revolution and, by the nineteenth century, a romantic vision of a lost Saxon paradise. When history became a subject for academic study, controversies still raged around such subjects as Saxon versus Norman institutions. The debates are still going on. Interest has now moved to such subjects as peoples and races, frontier societies, women's studies and colonialism.
`A wise, learned, gracefully written account of the Anglo-Norman world and its most remarkable chronicler.' SPECULUM Orderic Vitalis, born near Shrewsbury in 1075 and sent as a child oblate to the Norman abbey of Saint-Evroult, wrote one of the most vivid and important medieval chronicles. His world encompassed Shropshire in the aftermath of theConquest, Normandy in civil war and at peace, and, briefly, the wider French perspective of the priory of Maule. Saint-Evroult was open to all the cross-currents of a changing society, and Orderic witnessed fundamental changes inchurch organisation, patterns of aristocratic inheritance, attitudes towards knighthood, and Christian militancy towards non-Christians. This book is concerned with monastic life and culture and its interaction with the life of courts and Norman families. It also describes the life of Orderic himself, and an appendix gives a translation of his own moving account of his life, an epilogue to the Historia.MARJORIE CHIBNALL is a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She has written many booksand articles about the Anglo-Norman world, including an edition of Orderic's Ecclesiastical History.
This book provides the most comprehensive examination of the Normans available, examining the emergence of the Normans, their characteristics as a group, and their various achievements in war, culture and civilization.
Granddaughter of William the Conqueror and of King Malcolm of the Scots, and daughter of Henry I, Matilda fought for the throne of England, arguably hers by right, for nine years, and was denied it largely because she was a woman. In valour and determination Matilda may be compared with Boudicca or with Elizabeth I.
William of Poitiers served William the Conqueror for many years as one of his chaplains. His Gesta Guillelmi is a first-hand account of the momentous events of William's reign, and one of the most important sources for the history of the period. This new edition, with facing-page English translation of the Latin text, provides the first complete English translation, as well as a full historical introduction and detailed notes.
A life of Matilda—empress, skilled military leader, and one of the greatest figures of the English Middle Ages Matilda was a daughter, wife, and mother. But she was also empress, heir to the English crown—the first woman ever to hold the position—and an able military general. This new biography explores Matilda’s achievements as military and political leader, and sets her life and career in full context. Catherine Hanley provides fresh insight into Matilda's campaign to claim the title of queen, her approach to allied kingdoms and rival rulers, and her role in the succession crisis. Hanley highlights how Matilda fought for the throne, and argues that although she never sat on it herself her reward was to see her son become king. Extraordinarily, her line has continued through every single monarch of England or Britain from that time to the present day.
Wide-ranging studies offer an in-depth analysis of castle-building 11th - 12th centuries and place castles within their broader social and political context. The castles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries remain among the most visible symbols of the Anglo-Norman world. This collection brings together for the first time some of the most significant articles in castle studies, with contributions from experts in history, archaeology and historic buildings. Castles remain a controversial topic of academic debate and here equal weight is given to seminal articles that have defined the study of the subject while at the same time emphasising newer approaches to the fortresses of the Anglo-Norman...