Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO)

This monograph argues that members of the royal family have identified with Shakespearean figures at various times in modern history to assert the continuity, legitimacy, and national identity of the royal line. The book is driven by new archival research in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. It reads these archives critically, asking how different forms of royal and Shakespearean performance are remembered in the material holdings of royal institutions.

An edited collection of essays, with contributors using individual objects in the Royal Collection as the prompts for explorations of dynastic ambition, history, and prestige.

This article introduces two seventeenth-century library catalogues and considers them in relation to royal collecting and royalist politics.

: An essay in Adaptation examining the adaptation history of the Martin Guerre story and its implications for our understanding of early modern women’s knowledge and agency.

This monograph examines the place of photography in the reception of the Shakespeare canon since the invention of the camera.

This monograph offers a medicalised reading of Kempe’s spirituality in the context of the ubiquitous notion of Christ the Physician, and a new assessment of Kempe’s own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject.

This new critical volume explores Margery Kempe Studies in the 21^st Century, through multiple, probing, ‘encounters’. The volume is structured around four categories of encounter: textual, internal, external, and performative.

This volume of essays offers a comprehensive introduction to and investigation of the multivocality of women’s experience in the Middle Ages. Spanning from philosophical and theological enquiry, to education and art, as well as medical sciences and popular beliefs, the essays in this collection account for the complexities and richness of the conceptualisations and lived experiences of medieval Christian women.

The volume is part of the multi-volume series A Cultural History of Women in Christianity, the link to which is here.

This article reveals the contents of the mysterious, faded medicinal recipe on the final folio of British Library Additional MS 61823, The Book of Margery Kempe. It also offers a metaphorical reading of the recipe contents as a vehicle for Kempe’s ‘confection’ with God, enabling both an intense spiritual amalgamation and series of healing praxes.

Julian of Norwich (b. 1343) and Margery Kempe (b. 1373) are known for producing the earliest devotional works in Middle English by named female authors. Emerging in near-tandem from the religious hub of East Anglia in fourteenth-century England, their works and reputations have come to be known to varying extents in Europe. This essay explores the historical association of Julian and Margery with Continental Europe and the exchange of ideas which generated a flourishing of, especially female, piety.

Daniel Power, ‘The Latin West: multiple elites and overlapping jurisdictions’, Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700 – c. 1500: a framework for comparing three spheres, ed. C. Holmes, J. Shepard, J. van Steenburgen, and B. Weiler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 367-409

In the later Middle Ages a European 'core' of culturally and administratively sophisticated societies with rapidly growing populations, on an axis from England to Italy, colonised the European 'periphery'. In northern Europe this periphery included Wales and Ireland, as colonised by the English, and Prussia and Livonia, as colonised (mainly) by Germanic and Nordic peoples. A key tool of colonisation was the chartered town, giving citizens distinguishing legal privileges and a degree of self-regulation. Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europe contends that while the chartered town, as a legal and social-political concept, was transferred to peripheral areas by colonisers, its implementation and adaptation in peripheral areas resulted in unique societies, not simply the replication of core urban forms and communities. In so doing, it compares the development of social and political institutions in the chartered towns of medieval Ireland, Wales, Prussia, and Livonia. Research themes include community formation, normalisation/social disciplining, and peace making/keeping.

This chapter sets out an international model of native-incomer relations in the creation of towns in previously unurbanized areas.  It posits that three stages of inter-ethnic relations may be identified in both English-colonised Wales and German-colonised Prussia. These stages are, in order, initial inclusion of native persons to aid urban establishment, top-down lordly discrimination favouring colonists over natives, and late medieval bottom-up exclusion of native persons by colonist townspeople seeking to limit economic competition.

This work surveys the roles played by credit in the conquest and colonisation of Wales. It outlines the Welsh native law of contract and surety, relating to debt, and analyses the new system of debt recovery set out in the 1284 Statute of Wales. The role of Jewish creditors will also be touched upon. Finally, a case study will be presented of debt-related litigation in the borough and commotal courts of the lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd, 1295 – 1391. It is concluded that an unavailability of credit hampered Welsh rulers’ efforts to maintain their independence, that conquest brought about the modernisation of debt-recovery law in Wales, likely stimulating durable economic growth, and that Welsh persons were fully integrated into post-conquest local credit networks and debt recovery systems by the end of the fourteenth century

Welsh persons were subject to legal restrictions within and near Wales, from the point of local English conquest, c.1067–1283, until the 1536 Act of Union of England and Wales. In this article we outline modern scholars’ two main definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ applicable to the middle ages, both ‘race’ as a structural relationship used to essentialize and disadvantage a group and ‘race’ as a package of presumed heritable physical, mental and moral traits. We then survey discriminatory laws in Wales, characterizing them as falling into four broad categories: security, economic freedom, political rights, and legal rights. The context, nature and evolution of laws within each category are discussed. We finish by testing whether this body of law amounts to ‘race law’ in light of the given definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’, concluding that it is race law by both definitions. An appendix of indicative race law is provided.

This book surveys the economy of Wales from the first Norman intrusions of 1067 to the Act of Union of England and Wales in 1536. Key themes include the evolution of the agrarian economy; the foundation and growth of towns; the adoption of a money economy; English colonisation and economic exploitation; the collapse of Welsh social structures and rise of economic individualism; the disastrous effect of the Glyndŵr rebellion; and, ultimately, the alignment of the Welsh economy to the English economy. Comprising four chapters, a narrative history is presented of the economic history of Wales, 1067–1536, and the final chapter tests the applicability in a Welsh context of the main theoretical frameworks that have been developed to explain long-term economic and social change in medieval Britain and Europe.