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household instruction in bourgeois and gentry homes in England, and Rory G. Critten has shown how, in the case of one particular medieval book, Middle English conduct texts and romances might be played off against each other in order to arrive at a fresh conception of late-medieval bourgeois ethics.16 Looking further afield, Kathleen Ashley has examined why Books of Hours appear to be the texts of choice for recording family history during the late- medieval and early modern periods in France and England, and, in a series of articles, Roberta L. Krueger has examined the
was fuelled by my own identity and ancestry, by traces of names and occupations almost forgotten by the passage of time, by a family history of blacksmiths and other workers, at once too late and too soon for the ideals of the craft movement to be fulfilled. Academia has offered me a way up the social ladder, but not without an attendant anxiety about what is left behind, what is lost or abandoned, in the pursuit of an intellectual career, the life of the mind at the expense of the craft of the hands. I have tried to counter this sense of loss with scholarship that
I focus on him here is his reputation as an influential advocate of medieval popular romance; what I want to demonstrate is the extent to which such advocacy is, in the history of romance scholarship, invariably compromised. 10 Percy’s inscription is printed in Hales and Furnivall, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, vol. 1, p. lxxiv. 11 Chaplain to the Northumberlands and author of their family history (a position he secured on the back of the Reliques’ popular success), Percy was appointed in 1769 one of the King’s Chaplains en route, via a deanship, to the
landholding rules dictated the way contemporaries looked at their family history (genealogy). The Luttrell Psalter is a good example of a complex constructed image of a man and his family (both ancestral and extended). It is to be seen in the context of the time it was produced and as a document providing both a retrospective on the past and a prospect on the future. It was expressly manufactured at the request
, including family history, folk stories, and biblical and literary sources, it consistently returns to the narrative arc of this husband advising this particular wife as its structuring device. As a result, the disparate kinds of knowledge accumulated in Section One coalesce into a clear picture of 18 18 Glenn D. Burger how a young wife might herself become a model of authoritative female virtue, and does so clearly within the domestic context of how marital affection can structure husband–wife relations for the better. Compared to the first section, Section Two is
to emphasise the continuity of the story line. While it would obviously be misleading to say that such continuity is wholly absent from the Conte du Graal, Chrétien’s fabula plainly does not unravel as perspicuously as Percyvell’s, either in terms of presentation (witness the temporal distortions) or content. Specifically, compared with Percyvell’s mother, Perceval’s has been strikingly more successful in erasing the boy’s family history. The hero has no name apart from her appellation ‘fair son’, and no heirloom materialises the affinity between father and son
broadly. My analysis of the jeu noted Catherine’s background in the Messine patriciate, which combined wealth with elite family status. I now dig deeper, joining personal history with documentary practice by situating Catherine Baudoche and her female relatives within a context of biography, economic agency, and legal performance. Through the analysis of unpublished archival documents and personal seals, the following pages piece together the life stories of Catherine and her stepmother, Catherine Gronnaix, revealing a family history that positioned these women at a
audiences. One way in which I have tried to extend this concern with gifts and exchange in the texts I have read, is by paying attention to how telling is also a form of giving. Horn's explanation to Hunlaf of his family history, debts and journey; Amourant's expenditure of loyalty to Amiloun by recounting the bond between his master and Amis; Orfeo's gift of song, which moves his audiences to generosity; Gawain's return to Arthur's court with a story in words, wound and silk; the pledges and prayers of Chaucer's Theban and Trojan protagonists
in the jeu, for example, Claude used a series of ceremonies to successfully and permanently assume the identity of Joan of Arc. Contemporaneously with the jeu, Catherine Gronnaix founded a memorial liturgy that visualised her ongoing physical presence in front of the altar she had made to honour the Assumption of the Virgin. The same Catherine took on the role of ‘vassal’ in homage ceremonies, participated in confraternal celebrations, and initiated a procession that mapped her family history. Within her parish church, she and other female worshippers publicly
fourteenth century were not a new class: there had always been people like them about. What was new was their recognition as being of the gentility, a recognition visibly expressed in the extension to esquires – who were not knights and might not aspire to be such – of the right to coats of arms, the traditional chivalrous ensigns of lineage and of a family history of honourable service. Later, in the