Sources of London English


Book Description

The macaronic (mixed-language) business texts of London for the period 1275 to 1500 present a rich source of evidence for the medieval dialect of London English. Hitherto they have been ignored because of mistaken ideas about their value, but Laura Wright offers a reassessment of their importance in the development of the English language. The book focuses on terminology surrounding the River Thames to present a study of the medieval dialect of London. The vocabulary survey lists many words which had previously been lost to us, and the illustrative extracts from the texts present a fascinating picture of life in medieval times on the River Thames. The author's analysis covers the orthography, phonology, and morphology of the dialect as revealed in these texts.




Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400


Book Description

Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400 is the first study of donations to the Knights Hospitaller throughout England and Ireland during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The book demonstrates that patrons donated to both military and non-military orders for much the same reasons, particularly family connections or the desire for spiritual benefit, rather than an interest in crusading. Such a conclusion has important implications for the treatment of the military orders by scholars of medieval religion, who traditionally have either overlooked these orders entirely or relegated them to a subfield of crusade studies rather than treating them as a full part of mainstream religious life. By reincorporating the military orders into mainstream religious history, discussion will be furthered in a range of fields and debates, such as ecclesiastical landholding, lay-church relations, the role of women in religion, and the processes of the Reformation. By focusing on the period 1291 to 1400, the book considers the impact of the loss of the Holy Land in 1291; the subsequent diffusion in crusade activity to the Baltic and Spain; the intensification of the order’s career as English royal servants in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland; and the Hospitallers’ crusade to Rhodes in 1309-10. This book will appeal to scholars and students of the Hospitallers, as well as those interested in medieval Britain and Ireland.




Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603


Book Description

Contributing an original dimension to the significant body of published scholarship on women in 16th-century England, this study examines the largest corpus of women’s private writings available to historians: their wills. In these, female voices speak out, commenting on their daily lives, on identity, gender, status, familial relationships and social engagement. Wills show women to have been active participants in a civil society, well aware of their personal authority and potential influence, whose committed actions during life and charitable strategies after death could and did impact the health of that society. From an intensive analysis of more than 1200 wills, this pioneering work focuses on women from all parts of the country and all strata of society, revealing an entire population of articulate, opportunistic, and capable individuals who found the spaces between the lines of the law and used those spaces to achieve personal goals. Author Susan James demonstrates how wills describe strategies for end-of-life care, create platforms of remembrance, and offer insights into the myriad occupational endeavors in which women were engaged. James illuminates how these documents were not simply instruments of bequest and inheritance, but were statements of power and control, catalogues of material culture from which we are able to gauge a woman’s understanding of her own reality and the context that formed her environment. Wills were tools and the way in which women wielded these tools offers new ways to look at England in the 16th century and reveals the seminal role women played in its development.




Naming the People of England, c.1100-1350


Book Description

Medieval historians have for some time recognized the significance of personal naming processes and patterns for the illumination of social relations such as kinship and spiritual kinship or godparenthood. Increasingly, they are employing the investigation of personal naming (anthroponymy) as part of their elucidation of cultural change-attempting, through changes in patterns of personal naming, to discern cultural transitions and transformations. Recent coordinated research on the European continent has produced major collaborative discussion of the cultural implications of naming in France, the Iberian peninsular, and 'Italy'. The fruits of new research into the 'Germanic' lands have also richly enhanced our understanding of cultural change there. So it is predicated that a new trans-European culture arose in the centuries about and after the year 1000. Omitted from this coordinated understanding of the arrival of a new European cultural tradition (as it came to persist) is the British archipelago. We are, however, far from devoid of scholarly examination of the culture of personal naming in the British Isles. An older generation of linguists produced a basic foundation, although it has not remained free of some criticism. Subsequently, several scholars have independently advanced the interpretive analysis (Clark, Fellows Jensen, Insley, and McClure). At one level, then, this book attempts a synthesis of that previous, highly valuable, but diffuse, research, to make it more widely known, understood and accessible. At another level, nonetheless, it engages with what has become a prevailing narrative of cultural change in England after the Norman Conquest: the rapid transformation of English naming (and culture) through the assimilation of a new, dominant, extraneous influence. By reinserting the detail and complexity, it is hoped to demonstrate that far from a single uniform (homologous) culture, there existed residual, even resistant, and 'regional', cultures. The account, it is hoped, presents a cohesive, new narrative of the cultural implications of personal naming in England, whilst also addressing important issues of gender, politics, and social organization.







Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Chandler-Cleeve


Book Description

55,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2002.




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