Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages

Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages, éd. Julie Barrau et D. Bates, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Volumes de mélanges en l‘honneur d’Elisabeth van Houts

Présentation éditeur

How did medieval people define themselves? And how did they balance their identities as individuals with the demands of their communities? Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages intertwines the study of identities with current scholarship to reveal their multi-layered, sometimes contradictory dimensions. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from legal texts to hagiographies and biblical exegesis, and diverse cultural and social approaches, this volume enriches our understanding of medieval people’s identities – as defined by themselves and by others, as individuals and as members of groups and communities. It adopts a complex and wide-ranging understanding of what constituted ‘identities’ beyond family and regional or national belonging, such as social status, gender, age, literacy levels, and displacement. New figures and new concepts of ‘identities’ thus emerge from the dialogue between the chapters, through an approach based on life-histories, lived experience, ethnogenesis, theories of diaspora, cultural memory and generational change.

Table des matières

Julie Barrau et David Bates, Introduction

Part I – Entwined Lives and Multiple Identities

Miri Rubin, Mother and Motherhood in the Vita et passio Willelmi Norwicensis

Fiona J. Griffiths, Prayer for the dead: women, death, and salvation

Mathieu Arnoux, Authority over men and the distribution of property: two readings of William of Malmesbury

Julia Crick, Flemish settlement and maritime traffic in the south-west peninsula of Britain, c.1050-1250

Elma Brenner , Cistercians and the laity in twelfth and thirteenth-century Upper Normandy

Patricia Skinner, Memory and trauma: the strange case of Walchelin the Priest

Nicholas Vincent, New charters of the Empress Matilda, with particular reference to her reception at Gloucester in 1139

David Crouch, Female identity before 1250: the Preudefemme

Part II – Historians, Lawyers and Exegetes: Writing Lives and Identities

Pierre Bauduin, Ademar of Chabannes and the Normans: an outline of a new reading

David Bates, Lives, identities, and the historians of the Normans

Julie Barrau, Ruth in the twelfth century: medieval takes on the multiple identities of a foreign converted widow from Scripture

Anna Sapir Abulafia, Jacob and Esau and the interplay of Jewish and Christian identities in the Middle Ages

Leonie Hicks, Identity, gender and history in Waces Roman de Rou and Roman de Brut

John Hudson, Glanvill: language, law, and identity

George Garnett , Dunstan, Edgar, and the history of not-so-recent events

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