Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Chastity, Marriage, Widowhood, and Virginity
Discussions of chastity went to the core of discourses about sex and marriage in the Middle Ages, in particular as all three topics related to women. The connections begin with St. Paul, who stated that while marital sex was the only kind of sex allowed, chastity was the preferable state. According to medieval thinking, sexuality itself was uncorrupted and directed towards procreation before the Fall, … Read the rest
The Far East
Accounts of the Far East appealed to medieval people’s pleasure in wonder and their desire for political, moral, historical, and geographical intelligence. According to medieval Christian geography, the Orient is the top of the mappa mundi. It is the East, farther away but also the natural extension of a spiritual line from Europe at the bottom of the map, up by way of Rome and through Jerusalem, … Read the rest
Gender, Sexuality, and Difference Amazons
Christine de Pisan, Boccaccio, and many medieval Troy stories told and retold the ancient tales about Amazons. In them the land of “Femynye” is said to be located (to the modern mind in typically inconsistent fashion) beyond China and near the Caspian Sea. Though similar to many other marvels in romances and travel narratives (see “The Far East,” p. 99), Amazons are distinguished in some … Read the rest
Usurpation
For a year, beginning in November 1386, twelve lords of a “great and continual council” ruled England instead of King Richard II. Appointed by parliament and replacing the ineffectual chancellor Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, the council’s principal task was to reform the expenses and revenues of the king’s household. The king attempted a recovery of his power in August 1387, which culminated in a ruling by … Read the rest
Lollardy Trials
Religious and secular authorities applied the name “Lollard” to people from a cross-section of medieval society who believed in one or more heretical ideas, many of them deriving from the writings of John Wyclif (ca. 1330–84), the Oxford theologian. His writings, beginning in the 1370s, articulated a set of ideas that questioned traditional discourse about Church authority, state prerogatives, the nature of the sacraments, and authority to translate, … Read the rest
The English and England
Medieval writers from Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Layamon to the authors of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances, historical writings, and religious works described England in sociological terms. This kingdom, country, or nation, as Benedict Anderson observes of a later age, is here already imagined as a community of humans that is “limited” and “sovereign” even if its inhabitants are imprecise in answering where and when the … Read the rest
Force and Order Battle of Agincourt
The Hundred Years’ War is a misnomer not only because the hostilities between England and France lasted from 1337 to 1453, but also because, as with much medieval warfare, engaged fighting was comparatively infrequent during this period. Major battles usually lasted less than two weeks, commonly with less than 3,000 people on each side, siege being a far more common form of achieving victory. … Read the rest
Prioresses
In the year 1000 only six or seven religious houses for women existed in England. When religious houses were dissolved in the sixteenth century, approximately seventy-five Benedictine nunneries were active. Nuns’ primary duties were prayer, contemplation of religious texts, and duties that sustained their house. Nunneries’ wealth varied widely, from those that received royal patronage or that benefited from the bequests of affluent families, to houses that were in … Read the rest
Pilgrimage
The spiritual, moral, physical, and pecuniary aspects of pilgrimages were the subject of debate throughout the Middle Ages, but contention intensified in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England as it did on the Continent. Archbishops, bishops, and others encouraged the view that pilgrimages were effective in remitting sins, while popular belief in the efficacy of visiting shrines of saints for curative reasons remained strong. On the other hand, … Read the rest
Marriage
Three principal bodies of texts discussed marriage in late medieval Europe: theology, law, and literature. Theologians focused on marriage not only as a socially sanctioned state of mutual love between a man and a woman, but also as many possible relationships among the individual, the Church, and Christ. Hence, earthly marriage, and particularly the wife, ranked lower on a scale below other possible marriages, the married woman less favored … Read the rest