• Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Authority and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles

This volume is an attempt to discuss the ways in which themes of authority and gender can be traced in the writing of chronicles and chronicle-like writings from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With major contributions by fourteen authors, each of them specialists in the field, this study spans full across the compass of medieval and early modern Europe, from England and Scandinavia, to Byzantium and the Crusader Kingdoms; embraces a variety of media and methods; and touches evidence from diverse branches of learning such as language and literature, history and art, to name just a few. This is an important collection which will be of the highest utility for students and scholars of language, literature, and history for many years to come.


Dr Juliana Dresvina is currently a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at King’s College London, Visiting Scholar at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, and a research member of Wolfson College, Oxford, working on the psycho-history of late-medieval religious writings. She has previously worked at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, London, Reading and Winchester, and held research fellowships in Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, London, and INHA, Paris. Apart from articles on hagiography, she has contributed to the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project, published a parallel edition of Julian of Norwich’s works with the first ever Russian translation (2010), and is a co-editor, with Nicholas Sparks, of The Medieval Chronicle VII (2011). She is also a co-founder, again, with Dr Sparks, of the biennial Oxford-Cambridge Chronicles Symposium.

Dr Nicholas Sparks gained his first degree in Australia, where he studied Old English Language and Literature, with specific focus on the palaeography of Anglo-Saxon texts. He read Anglo-Saxon History at the University of Cambridge, where he went on to receive a PhD for his work “Textual Histories of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: The Alfredian Common Stock”. Since 2006, he has been a Research Assistant at Evellum Digital Publishing. Since 2008, he has been supervising students of palaeography and codicology at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, University of Cambridge. He is currently involved in a few novel interdisciplinary collaborations, including the new scholarly digital facsimile edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 636, the “Peterborough Chronicle” (ASC witness E), to be published in 2013 as Vol. 4 in the Bodleian Digital Texts Series. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Assistant Librarian at the Warburg Institute.

“The contributors tackle big questions – sovereignty, power, loyalty, gender determinacy and representation – in essays spanning nine centuries of chronicles and many languages. But there’s plenty here to entertain enthusiasts as well as specialists – great princes, male and female, damsels in distress, hussies, and hapless kings consort.”
– Professor Jane Roberts, University of London

“I recommend this collection of essays, Authority and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles, as a ‘must be read book’ in order to understand how men and women used the writing of the past to express notions of power and authority for the audiences they addressed. It is a pioneering book that is innovative and interdisciplinary. I hugely enjoyed reading it.”
– Professor Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge

“This collection squarely faces questions of authority and authorisation, while moving beyond the narrow definition of gender as the feminine. It is strong on visual imagery as well as the written word, and full of refreshing surprises, from the symbolism of sideboards to the contested authority of male consorts. Anyone interested in chronicle studies will want to read it.”
– Professor Pauline Stafford, University of Liverpool

“Long an underrated genre among medievalists, historians and literary scholars alike, the chronicle in recent years has shed its musty image and shown itself a rewarding object of study. The essays on authority and gender in the present volume demonstrate that chronicles often look at the events that make up history from a different angle, and thus can provide fresh insights or incite renewed discussion.”
– Dr Erik Kooper, Utrecht University

Judith Collard

Cristian Bratu Cristian

Graeme Dunphy

Gregory Fedorenko

Leonie V. Hicks

Olga Karaskova

Sarah Lambert

Jinty (Janet Nelson

Margaretha Nordquist

Ryan Lavelle Ryan

Ben Snook

Nicholas Sparks

Noa Turel

Elena Woodacre

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-4145-5

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-4145-0

Release Date: 23rd November 2012

Pages: 495

Price: £54.99

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