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inside an altar, which henceforth took the name of the person venerated. In some cases the bishop rededicated the church where this translation took place to include the name of the new saint, which we have seen was the case at Saint-Mattia of Cremona in 1493. The list of saints proclaimed in Western Europe between the ninth and twelfth centuries demonstrates clearly that its membership was drawn almost exclusively from the minuscule proportion of the population at the very pinnacle of society: royal families, noble families, and high
unknown number of daughters, and a dowager queen alongside his own wife; by 1002 he had married twice, perhaps three times, and produced at least two more sons. Not since the reign of his great-grandfather Edward the Elder at the beginning of the century had an English king been blessed – or faced – with such a progeny, and with the issue of providing for it. Another feature of charters of the 990s is the prominence of this royal family. The dowager queen, Ælfthryth, Æthelred’s mother, re-emerged in witness lists now and the king’s sons appeared for the first time. 22
community. The votive inscriptions which are the major guide to patronage at this time, carry a smattering of references to donations by local rulers such as the Satavahana dynasty and what might be described as the local aristocracy – erstwhile chiefs of clans now moving into positions of administrative importance and marrying into royal families. The major monasteries were either rock-cut monasteries, clustered around the passes on important trade routes commanding the descent from the plateau of the Deccan to the trading centres of the west coast, or else the
been achieved early on, according to Marc Bloch, this was not necessarily accepted as proof of dynastic legitimacy, which remained an issue with which the Capetians struggled for more than a century and a half. 12 Scholars have hitherto been correct to point out the remarkable smoothness with which the Capetians ascended the French throne. Gabrielle Spiegel, for example, has pointed to the lack of invective directed against the royal family and the speed with which Capetian rule was accepted. 13 This does not mean
careers of two queens, Brunhild and Balthild, which brought to light issues of gender to explain why these women had been treated so harshly by writers both ancient and modern. Subsequent studies have addressed writing and gender more generally, widows and strategies of inheritance, queenship, women and royal courts, and the women in various royal families, not least the daughters of Charlemagne. These
wife, Joan, the principal lady-in-waiting of the queen. 42 By Henry VI’s reign, denization was a relatively routine resort for ‘above-stairs’ members of the king’s and queen’s households. 43 It was also now considered appropriate to grant denizations to foreign women marrying into the royal family and titled nobility. Following the precedent set by Lucia Visconti, countess of Kent, in 1408, two Portuguese ladies, both named Beatrice, who were the widows of Lord Talbot and the earl of Arundel, sought the benefits of denization in order to have incontrovertible right
appropriately cautious not to read the organization of these later sources back onto an earlier period. If we remove from consideration those duplicate chapters found in both the Vita Ludovici and the Morigny text, which was composed much later, then twenty-five of thirty-two chapters are predominantly concerned with the King’s military deeds, and a further two recount the crusading exploits of men closely associated with the royal family, making a total of twenty-seven of thirty-four chapters with a military focus, several of which make specific
, attributed the conflicts within the royal family not to Judith’s embodiment of wicked stepmotherhood, but to her youth and folly. ‘She played childishly’, 86 and when the ageing Louis’s enthusiasm cooled, she sought another sexual partner, and found one in Bernard of Septimania whom Louis had appointed to be his chamberlain and Charles’s tutor – posts which necessitated ex officio contacts with the empress. 87 Even the loyal Nithard denounced Bernard for having ruined the commonweal with his selfishness and insatiable lust. Bernard fled after the first revolt of Louis
of Northmen into Frankish politics. Roric, Scandinavian lord of Frisia and Christian convert, was among the viri illustres to whom Hincmar wrote letters urging his intervention in reconciling a dangerous dispute within the royal family: Charles’s daughter Judith, widowed in Wessex, had refused to settle for chaste incarceration, deciding instead on remarriage to Baldwin, a young noble on the make, and if necessary threatening to seek refuge with Roric. Hincmar displayed a strong professional interest in that affair for it went to the heart of politics at court
must have been discomforting for Philip and Prince Louis, less than five years later, to watch Bohemond use the occasion of a royal wedding to recount his crusading achievements and try to convince the flower of French knighthood to follow him to Byzantium. After all, the crusader was an interloper if judged by aristocratic rank, but the prime attraction if judged by attention. To be sure, the original purpose of the marriage may have been to appropriate some of Bohemond’s crusading prestige for the royal family, but not at the cost of overshadowing their own