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This article employs a large database of 10,360 deaths taken from registrations of graves dug and church bells tolled at Haarlem between the years 1412 and 1547—one of the largest samples and longest series of mortality evidence ever produced for medieval Holland—and systematically compares findings with a seventeenth-century burial register for the same city. It concludes that we should put aside any lingering notion that late medieval Holland was very lightly affected by epidemic diseases: in fact, in Haarlem, these mortality crises were more severe than those seen in the seventeenth century. The data also reveal not one overarching “medieval mortality regime” but distinct changes between fewer but more severe spikes in the first half of the fifteenth century, and higher frequency of smaller spikes later on—especially in the period 1480–1530—with the number of mortality crises damping down after 1530. These mortality crises tended to produce more adult female victims than male, supporting recent findings from elsewhere in the late medieval Low Countries.

The earliest English rutter, a maritime navigational treatise from the mid-fifteenth century, is among the oldest of its kind to survive in Europe. Its three manuscripts, one with vivid illuminations, and a sixteenth-century print edition address the landmasses, coastal seas, and shores around England, Ireland, northern France, Spain, and Portugal. From the rutter we can gain an intimate sense of how the ecotones—the coastal areas—were perceived. Given the relatively large quantity of available information about early owners, we also can begin to ask what this group of people might have found attractive about a navigational text. The answers to these inquiries, I will demonstrate, cast light on the geographical topic of the sea, on the nature of anthology manuscripts, and on late-medieval understandings of space more generally.

Apart from Latin, French was Britain and England's only medieval supraregional language: English remained a regional language of the British Isles until well into the early modern period, with, for example, almost no translations of major English-language works until then. Although insular French differed over time from the various Frenches of Continental regions, French retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility throughout Europe and on both sides of the Channel, and exchanges between England and Continental regions in both directions continued throughout the Middle Ages. The importance of England as the location of the earliest French-language literary culture early in the twelfth century is now widely recognized, and England's influence on the development of French-language literary writing in Europe becoming more so: interchange, exchange, and mutual influence continued in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, though in shifting proportions. French also remained indispensable to external contac...

From the time of their first appearance at the end of the eleventh century, medieval funerary effigies have presented their viewers with a strikingly uniform set of compositional conventions. The sculptural representation of the frontal body carved in relief on a rectangular slab is found so consistently among effigies of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries that this formula has become very nearly synonymous with the term “effigy” itself. The standard compositional type had already appeared in the bronze effigy of Rudolf of Swabia in Merseburg Cathedral (c.1080–1084), the earliest surviving effigy known to medieval art, and would be repeated for the tombs of the Nellenburg dukes of Schaffhausen (c.1105–1110), the Ottonian abbesses of Quedlinburg (c.1129), and the Merovingian kings from Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris (c.1150, now installed at Saint-Denis), to name just a few prominent examples. Each of these sculptures shows its subject dressed in different costume and holding different attributes as ...

Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe, eds., Society in an Age of Plague. (Fifteenth Century 12.)Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. x, 223; 9 black-andwhite figures and 1 map. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84383-875-3.

Between 1069, the year of his arrival at St. Martin in Mainz, where he spent the rest of his life in voluntary enclosure in a cell, and his death in 1082, the Irish monk Marianus Scottus dedicated countless hours to assembling the most sophisticated and comprehensive work on historical chronology that had ever been produced by a Latin writer up to that time. The fruits of his labors became a massive world chronicle, completed in 1076, whose most famous innovation consisted in a far-reaching correction to the Christian, or “common,” era, which had been introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century. Having compared the data of the Easter computus with the chronological parameters traditionally associated with the passion of Christ—the fifteenth day of the moon on Friday, 25 March—Marianus found that the only year in which the numbers could be made to fit was AD 12 rather than the traditionally accepted AD 34. As a result, he decided to predate the life of Jesus by twenty-two years, assigning his birt...

In 1460 Karl von Seckendorf sent the following note along with a manuscript that included a biblical commentary, the Postilla super epistulas dominicales by Matthias de Liegnitz, to an acquaintance.

The prolific English poet John Lydgate (c.1371–1449) has been known as the “monk of Bury” since the early fifteenth century. Both his popularity and perceptions of his literary merit have fluctuated wildly since his zenith as the famous laureate of Henry V, Henry VI and Duke Humphrey, but readers have been constant in their association of Lydgate with the Benedictine abbey from which the epithet derives. However, there has been remarkably little examination of the details of Lydgate's existence at Bury: the critical emphasis has been on Lydgate's contact with Lancastrian society rather than on his quotidian life as a monk. “To trace in detail the connection between the Bury library and the characteristic configuration of Lydgate's thought and work, to see how his mind was formed and influenced by the books with which he was in such familiar contact” remains an unfulfilled desire. In particular, given the range of Lydgate's literary and intellectual allusions, it is surprising that there has been no full a...

During the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Florence there was a growth in the production and acquisition of small religious paintings for use in prayer in the home.1 Simultaneously, there was an increase in the availability of devotional literature, spiritual writings, and sermons composed for laypeople.2 How did the Florentine layperson of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries combine word and image in a private ritual whose purpose was to lift the mind to God? In considering that question, I will refer to the diary, or Ricordi, of Giovanni Morelli (1371-1444), a merchant who was enrolled in the Arte della Lana.3 Mo

Before a crowd of eager Arthurian spectators assembled near Carlisle, Galeron, introduced earlier as the "grettest" (greatest) of Galloway, kneels, signaling his submission to the stand-in for the imperial war machine to which he will soon swear allegiance.1 It is thus through dispossession and repossession that The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelayne stages the centrality of land to power plays in the Anglo-Scottish marches. The poem does not present an "English" Gawain who defeats a "Scottish" Galeron, winning yet another soldier for the armies of a British empire, but rather simultaneously invites and forecloses readings of the poem's territorial conflicts as essentially national or ethnic. In portraying the practice of side switching, key to survival on the militarized Anglo-Scottish border, the Awntyrs joins with a text that, though of a more northerly provenance, also defies simple national classification and that is also grounded in the brutal and fluid world of border warfare, where profit regularly trumped patriotism in determining to which power player marcher lords and their retainers gravitated. The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, though ostensibly of "Scottish" provenance, joins the Awntyrs in speaking from a marcher perspective of the impact of the raids and invasions that wracked the Anglo-Scottish borderlands.2 By bracketing our sense of the "national" origins of these poems, we can trace the manner in which they each manage critiques of imperialist expansionism. These critiques register regional reactions to processes of nation formation sweeping away the borderlands society that had fed off the almost continuous armed conflict of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Even as these texts reveal a nostalgia for the bravado and localism of war-torn times, they also speak to the devastation and misery produced by an economic world built upon violence. While the Awntyrs, set near the marcher stronghold of Carlisle, ultimately situates the collapse of the Arthurian empire at the very edge of its expanding frontier, Golagros offers

The woodcuts used to illustrate early printed editions of the Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi reinforce visually the sharp contrast between the two protagonists named in the traditional title of this exceptionally interesting Latin dialogue. Ap parently in circulation by the twelfth century or earlier, it survives only in manu scripts and prints from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.1 A finely detailed image from a print produced after 1500 (Fig. 1) depicts a handsome, crowned Solomon, intent on the words of the coarse rustic who stands before him, dishev eled and barefoot.2 These unlikely interlocutors are engaged in a formal argument

Around the middle of the fifteenth century, the Spanish courtier mosen Fernando de la Torre gathered together a miscellany of his epistles and poems under the title El libro de las veynte cartas e quistiones (The Book of Twenty Letters and Ques tions). He did so at the behest of one of the most powerful noblewomen of his day, doiia Leonor, countess of Foix, third daughter of Juan II of Navarre and Aragon, who, for a few days before her death in 1479, would herself become queen of Navarre. Viewed as a whole, this miscellany is a highly self-conscious product of what the compiler called "el dulce comercio e pasatienpo por escrip tura" ("the sweet commerce and pastime of writing"): the collection presents lit erary composition as an emphatically social act, a means of establishing an extended network of friendships bound together by the love of letters.1 The importance of this literary bonding determines the tone and in some cases the theme of the epistolary exchanges, most notably the discussion between mosen Fernando and the celebrated poet and bibliophile Ifigo Lopez de Mendoza, marquis of Santillana (1398-1458), about the difference between love and friendship. Friendship, wrote Santillana, "consiste en comunicacion" ("consists of communication," p. 120) and is superior to love because it is grounded upon "continua e espresa conver sacion" ("uninterrupted and open conversation," p. 120), and this intercourse (and I use that term advisedly, as I shall explain) binds two people together through their shared desires and mutual knowledge. Knowledge is the key concept here: for unlike love, which can be felt for someone who is unknown or absent, friend ship cannot take place without "conoscimiento" (p. 121), the knowing or intimate experience of the other person. And the two men then cement their mutual "conos cimiento" by exchanging verse written about their amatory experiences.

In 1362 the government of Edward III issued a statute that is one of the best-known, but least-understood, statements on the use of the vernacular in medieval England. The legislation required that English, rather than French, should be the compulsory language of oral communication in all royal and seignorial courts in the land. This article attempts a new evaluation of the place of the statute of 1362 in later medieval legal and political culture. It falls into five parts. The first discusses the text of the statute; the second analyzes the political context in which the legislation was issued; the third explores what the statute may tell us about the royal judicial system operating in the 1360s; the fourth attempts a reevaluation of the more general use of French and English in law, government, and politics during the later fourteenth century, within the context provided by the Hundred Years War and the Anglo-French peace of 1360; and the fifth attempts to reposition the statute and its implications in relation to Henry V's much-vaunted promotion of English as a language of record in the early fifteenth century.

Richard Andrew was a prominent member of the small but distinguished group of churchmen, educated at the twin foundations of Winchester and New College, whose collective contribution did much to shape Lancastrian policy toward the government of both church and kingdom in the middle years of the fifteenth century. Most of this group are conveniently depicted, imagined as an idealized community of scholars, in the frontispiece to the Collocutiones compiled by Thomas Chaundler, warden of New College, between circa 1461 and 1464. Chaundler's accompanying text extolled a strenuous version of the mixed life, combining learning, religion, and public service, that the careers of these men preeminently embodied.1 Yet there was an unavoidably elegiac quality to Chaundler's celebration, for the most prominent subjects of his encomium-William Waynflete, chancellor (1456-60); Thomas Bekynton, king's secretary (1433-43) and keeper of the privy seal (1443-44); Andrew Holes, keeper of the privy seal (1450-52), as well as Richard Andrew himself (king's secretary, 1443-54)-had all risen in the service of Henry VI, now deposed and in exile.2 Only William Say, dean of the chapel royal since 1448, retained the influence and authority that royal service conferred.3 Say's contribution to the collective welfare of the Wykehamist endeavor, as a "flowering shoot" that had grown into a "mighty cedar," was consequently accorded a special prominence, while the administrative services of Andrew and Holes, both firmly associated with the discredited Lancastrian regime, were left studiously unspecific: "my pen would extol them longer," Chaundler concludes, "were it not that the kingdom of England already resounds with praise for their works." Such uncertainties were a new and unsettling experience for those, like Richard Andrew, who had learned to live with profit between church and state. The prob

Thomas Hoccleve has long been read as a garrulous eccentric inhabiting the fringes of late-medieval literary history. H. S. Bennett suggested fifty years ago that the most important fact about Hoccleve was his "constant gossiping about himself," and that sentiment still informs most discussion.1 But what is only beginning to be realized is how significant an action it is to gossip about oneself. The whole point of gossip is its powerful third-person framework, its capacity to cement the bond between two persons present through (often malicious) reference to someone absent.2 Hoccleve's work, however, occupies a curious middle ground between gossip and autobiography. He consistently adopts the voice of the gossip, a voice of informal and scandalous revelation, but instead of using this voice to expose another, Hoccleve insistently prods at himself. Considered historically, this gossiping habit raises a difficult question. Why should such gossip, which might also claim to be the dramatic first stirrings of vernacular autobiography, come from a clerk at Westminster, one of those whose professional responsibilities had less to do with self-expression than with the endless reduplication of a language of grave bureaucratic anonymity? As many critics have pointed out, the basic elements of Hoccleve's poetic persona (a man anxiously peering in from the edge of the social order, obsessively confessing his inadequacies in love, knowledge, skill, and finance) were provided by the example of Chaucer's own experiments in self-portraiture.3 But what were the historical and sociological causes that led to the perpetuation and intensification of this figure in the postChaucerian poetry of the fifteenth century? It will be my contention that Hoccleve's interest in the trivia of subjectivity can only be fully understood once we appreciate the cultural impact of an emergent class of secularized bureaucrats.

Traditions and rituals play an important role in all facets of human behavior, and those connected with government tell us much about the society in which they are practiced.1 They point to the history, values, and self-image of the society, and any change in their content or practice reflects a revision of that status, a realignment of the self-image. Among the many traditions that had grown over the centuries and that both framed and shaped the activities and the image of the Florentine government, those of the mensa of the Signoria were particularly significant. From the beginning of the Priorate in 1282, the mensa, the twice-daily communal meals held in the privacy of the Palace of the Signoria, had been conducted with a decorum that emphasized the way in which the executives of the government viewed themselves and their office. When alterations were made to some of these practices in the 1380s, they reflected fundamental changes in the self-perception of the members of the Signoria, and by extension of the city-state as a whole. The alteration on which I wish to focus involves the dinner music, a seemingly insignificant change but one that reflects a profound reorientation of cultural values. Some of the facts of the change have been reported previously in passing, but their significance has gone unnoticed until now.2 The mensa took place in the civic office building now known as the Palazzo Vecchio, which has served as the seat of Florentine government since its construction in 1300.3 It is not certain which room was originally the site of the mensa; the earliest record comes from the late fifteenth century, when the mensa was held in the Sala dei Gigli, a spacious room on the second floor located conveniently at the foot of the stairs descending from the third-floor kitchen.4 The Signoria was the executive branch of the city government, consisting of eight Priors (augmented from the original six following the constitutional reforms of the mid-fourteenth century) and the Standard-Bearer of Justice. Present at the mensa in addition to

Between 1423 and 1435 the Flemish cities of Ypres and Ghent engaged in a protracted struggle over a waterway called the leperleet, which connected Ypres to the sea. The struggle was played out in the courtroom, in brawls along canal banks, and even in a quasi-military expedition. This series of legal battles and fistfights-what I will call the leperleet Affair-is a graphic example of the changing economic and political fortunes of the cities of Flanders during the unsettled conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Recently Marc Boone has described the case to highlight the changing balance of ducal and urban power in late-fourteenthand fifteenth-century Flanders. Willem Blockmans has used it to demonstrate how conflicting interests could paralyze efforts to govern Flanders by representative assembly and thereby favor the accretion of power by the central government. David Nicholas has cited it to illustrate Ghent's aggressive and successful struggle for economic survival, complementing Henri Pirenne's mention of the Affair in a discussion of the decline of fifteenth-century Ypres.1 The Affair was an important case for much of Flanders and northwestern France, its reverberations generating further legal wrangles and reinforcing changes in economic frontiers (and the legal recognition of those changes). However, discussions of the Affair are cursory. With the exception of Blockmans's careful reconstruction of the actions of the representative assembly of the Four

Francis Ingledew's impressive recent article in this journal argues the following: that the Trojan historiography produced by secular clerics for Norman lords and English kings is characterized by the defining features of the Virgilian philosophy of history (i.e., the genealogical, the prophetic, and the erotic).' Even if the "Book of Troy" is "irreducible . .. to any single work," Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae may be taken to be exemplary of it, since Geoffrey's "book is the effective mastertext of the new rendering of the historical field."2 In this article I set aside my agreement with the broad thrust of Ingledew's argument; instead I want to qualify it in two ways. In the first place, I question whether the template of the Aeneid can be used quite so straightforwardly for Galfridian material. More importantly, I question the notion of one "Troy Book." There is another version of the "Troy Book," that of Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae, translations of which constitute a significant body of English vernacular writing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This tradition is resolutely anti-imperialistic in every way. Even if works in this tradition were written for aristocratic readers, they were pitched from a clerical position that stood opposed to imperial enterprise. I make each of these points by looking back to English narratives in the Guido tradition from the vantage point of Gavin Douglas's early-sixteenthcentury translation of the Aeneid, his Eneados.

Throughout the turbulent early years of the fifteenth century, English magnates were having more than usual difficulty gaining access to, or remaining in, their own graves. Like Hitchcock's Harry, they kept being moved around. One of Henry IV's first acts upon acceding to the throne was to move Thomas, duke of Gloucester, to a better location in Westminster Abbey.' After defeating Henry Hotspur at Shrewsbury, Henry IV first permitted his burial but then disinterred him and displayed his body suspended between two millstones to prove he was really dead.2 Consumed with a sense of his own sinfulness, Henry IV eschewed the Westminster burial dictated for him by tradition and chose to lie in Canterbury instead.3 And of course the remains of Henry IV's victim, Richard II, lay

A friend of mine recently lent me a little book entitled What a Young Wife Ought to Know, by Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake, M.D., of Denver, Colorado. It was published in 1902 and is one of the Self and Sex series of "pure books on avoided subjects." Its premise is that "Woman [is] fitted by the creator for wifehood and motherhood,"'' and it has chapters entitled "Home and Dress," "Marital Relations," "The Mother the Teacher," and so on. My friend had come across it in, of all places, the library of a mental hospital where his wife was being treated for postpartum depression. He stole it as a matter of principle. What a Young Wife Ought to Know has its late-medieval equivalent in a poem of around two hundred lines known as "What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter," which has been used quite often by medieval historians as evidence for aspects of female behavior in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2 There are problems with this, though, as a comparison with Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake's book shows. Historians of the early twentieth century would not, I assume, use What a Young Wife Ought to Know as evidence of social practice; rather, its interest is ideological. The same is true of "What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter": it is a poem that speaks for the special interests that have shaped its form and content. One way of demonstrat

L'A. etudie les sermons academiques prononces dans les universites d'Oxford a la fin du XV e siecle. Il s'agit, a partir de la, de reconstituer la formation prodiguee en matiere d'homiletique dans le cursus theologique de ces facultes a la meme epoque. Pour ce faire, l'A. se fonde sur les textes retrouves et dont il publie quelques extraits (parfois en latin non traduit) pour illustrer son propos. Un sermon est cite integralement en latin a la fin de l'article : celui de la cathedrale de Worcester (W-22)

Scholars have long recognized that riddles were part of literary and intellectual culture in late-medieval England, and considerable effort has been expended to ponder a prominent handful of late-fourteenth-century writings in Latin and English that use them, including John Ergome's commentary on the Vaticinium of "John of Bridlington," the seditious vernacular letters circulated during the Rising of 1381, and most famously Piers Plowman, all notorious for the use of peculiar and difficult riddles that flaunt their interpretative challenges and the social power of their hermeneutical barriers. Comparatively vast gaps, however, remain in our knowledge of the range, distinctive modes, and customary contexts of riddles in this period, so that the isolated uses of them that have been studied seem, in May McKisack's words about Piers Plowman, to speak "to us from a forgotten world, drowned, mysterious, irrecoverable."' What follows is a discussion and a set of transcriptions of a newly identified and correlated body of materials from the early fourteenth through the late fifteenth century that display the presence and principles of riddling in latemedieval rhetorical materials and intellectual culture more completely than previously available texts have allowed. My hope thereby is to begin to fill in this lacuna in literary, intellectual, and rhetorical history so that we might appreciate more fully the period's literary, religious, and political applications of such materials. Finally, I propose on the basis of these materials a new solution to some of the riddles in Piers Plowman, including the central riddle sequence in that poet's successively revised work: that of Patience at the end of the banquet with the Doctor of Divinity, a riddle that the poet presents in very different forms in the B and the C texts of the poem. I speak here of "the poet's" work and revisions advisedly, for although it seems nearly otiose at this date to add

According to Aristotle, the household was one of the constituent parts of the state. He defined the household in its complete form as consisting of slaves and freemen. Within the household he discerned three primary relationships: those between master and slave, husband and wife, and father and child.' Essential to Aristotle's definition of the household is the inclusion of kin and nonkin members, a circumstance that persisted well into the modern period. Yet medieval social historians have for the most part ignored nonkin members of households, and histories of the family and of households have concentrated almost exclusively on family members. Some of the sources encourage this emphasis. One example is the abundant tax records and census figures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notably in Florence but also in other Italian and Provencal towns. Historians working with those sources often use the word "household" as a synonym for "family" or "clan." When David Herlihy refers to the hearth or the household, he means the family members.2 Richard Goldthwaite's description of the family as "a small group" takes into account only those related by blood or marriage living in one household.3 F. W. Kent, in his study of three Florentine families, declares, "Here a household is understood to be a group of kinsmen living in the same house or in several houses which, in the manner of the time, were joined together to form in effect one dwelling. . ..4 The practice of defining the household as a group of coresident kin persists even when the sources offer material relevant to household members who were not related by blood or marriage.5 The best of these sources is the rich fund of late-medieval notarial records, which have yet to be exploited as they could be to develop a broader conception of people's intimate, domestic space. House