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This book shows that food in late-medieval England was far more complex, varied, and more culturally significant than we imagine today. Drawing on a vast range of sources, the book charts how emerging technologies as well as an influx of new flavours and trends from abroad had an impact on eating habits across the social spectrum. The book begins with a background of the concept of food in medieval England, and moves through discussions on food in the countryside, the importance of drinks and drinking to late medieval society, the importance of bread, the role of sauces and spices, gardens, food and drink at civic occasions, food of monks and nuns, cooks and kitchens, and hunger and famine. From the pauper's bowl to elite tables, from early fad diets to the perceived moral superiority of certain foods, and from regional folk remedies to luxuries such as lampreys, the book illuminates desire, necessity, daily rituals, and pleasure across four centuries.

This book explores the religious and secular rituals that marked the passage of the year in late medieval and early modern England, and tells the story of how these rituals altered over time in response to political, religious, and social changes. The book examines a number of important and controversial issues such as: the character and pace of the English Reformation; the nature of the early Stuart ‘Reformation of Manners’; the context of writers such as Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; the origins of the science of folklore; the relevance of cultural divisions in the English Civil War; the impact of the English Revolution; and the viability of economic explanations for social change. The book includes source material such as local financial records.

The importance of the medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis. The monastic superiors of late medieval England ruled over thousands of monks and canons, who swore to them vows of obedience; they were prominent figures in royal and church government; and collectively they controlled properties worth around double the Crown’s annual ordinary income. As guardians of regular observance and the primary interface between their monastery and the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective functioning and well-being of the monastic order. This book provides the first detailed study of English monastic superiors, exploring their evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual chapters examine the election of late medieval monastic heads; the internal functions of the superior as the father of the community; the head of house as administrator; abbatial living standards and modes of display; monastic superiors’ public role in service of the Church and Crown; their external relations and reputation; the interaction between monastic heads and the government in Henry VIII’s England; the Dissolution of the monasteries; and the afterlives of abbots and priors following the suppression of their houses. This study of monastic leadership sheds much valuable light on the religious houses of late medieval England, including their spiritual life, administration, spending priorities, and their multi-faceted relations with the outside world. It also elucidates the crucial part played by monastic superiors in the dramatic events of the 1530s, when many heads surrendered their monasteries into the hands of Henry VIII.

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of ‘legal pluralism’. Law in Common provides a way of apprehending this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. The first half of the book explores four ‘local legal cultures’ – in the countryside, towns and cities, the maritime world, and Forests – that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law. The second half of the book turns to examine ‘common legalities’, widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, it offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives. Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century through legality.

Just as twenty-first-century technologies such as blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. This book uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, the author argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image–text crossroads, the book addresses the manuscript's texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk's cell and also outside. The author reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.

While literary scholars, under the influence of ‘historicist’ literary theory, have insisted on the need to understand Chaucer’s poetry in its historical context, medieval historians have made little attempt to join in with debates about the meaning of his work. This volume sets out to remedy this lack. Here, 25 leading historians of late medieval England discuss the portraits of the pilgrims in the ‘General Prologue’ to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in relation to their own area of expertise. The first chapter of the collection sets out recent debates about Chaucer’s engagement with the conflicts and controversies of his day and, in particular presents three main ways in which literary critics have made sense of Chaucer’s moral and social outlook: Chaucer as conservative; Chaucer as sceptical or radical; Chaucer as open-ended. Each of the 25 chapters which follow offers a detailed discussion of particular pilgrims. The historians involved offer a range of economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual contexts within which to make sense of Chaucer’s s work whilst always retaining a sense of its specifically literary nature and conventions. The book is far more coherent than the usual edited collection of essays and concludes by drawing together the main themes and conclusions of the debate. The book seeks to introduce historians to recent controversies about the meaning of Chaucer’s text in relation to the poet’s historical context whilst also showing literary critics what historians may have to offer to such debates.