This Palgrave Pivot provides the first ever comprehensive consideration of the part played by women in the workings and business of the English Parliament in the later Middle Ages. Breaking new ground, this book considers all aspects of women’s access to the highest court of medieval England. Women were active supplicants to the Crown in Parliament, and sometimes appeared there in person to prosecute cases or make political demands. It explores the positions of women of varying rank, from queens to peasants, vis-à-vis this male institution, where they very occasionally appeared in person but were more usually represented by written petitions. A full analysis of these petitions and of the official records of parliament reveals that there were a number of issues on which women consistently pressed for changes in the law and its administration, and where the Commons and the Crown either championed or refused to support reform. Such is the concentration of petitions on the subjects of dower and rape that these may justifiably be termed ‘women’s issues’ in the medieval Parliament.

This history describes in narrative form, the way in which Parliament evolved from politics through the Middle Ages, taking the reader to what can be regarded as the end of the English medieval period in 1485.

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England investigates the relationship between the development of parliament and the practice of English poetry in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this period, the bureaucratic political culture of parliamentarians, clerks, and scribes overlapped with the artistic practice of major poets like Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, all of whom had strong ties to parliament. Matthew Giancarlo investigates these poets together in the specific context of parliamentary events and controversies, as well as in the broader environment of changing constitutional ideas. Two chapters provide fresh analyses of the parliamentary ideologies that developed from the thirteenth century onward, and four chapters investigate the parliamentary aspects of each poet, as well as the later Lancastrian imitators of Langland. This study demonstrates the importance of the changing parliamentary environs of late medieval England and their centrality to the early growth of English narrative and lyric forms.

New approaches to the political culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, considering its complex relation to monarchy and state.

Now reissued in an updated paperback edition, this groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England—from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and Tennyson to Pound, Tolkien, and Rowling. “Medievalism . . . takes a panoramic view of the ‘recovery’ of the Medieval in English literature, visual arts and culture. . . . Ambitious, sweeping, sometimes idiosyncratic, but always interesting.”—Rosemary Ashton, Times Literary Supplement “Deeply researched and stylishly written, Medievalism is an unalloyed delight that will instruct and amuse a wide readership.”—Edward Short, Books & Culture

The English Parliament in the Middle Ages is a collection of 26 essays written by historians H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles between 1925 and 1967. These essays - some collaborative, and some written individually by Richardson and Sayles - illuminate various aspects of English parliamentary history, beginning with the origins of parliament. Brought together with a foreword and additional notes by G. O. Sayles, this volume provides a comprehensive reference point for all scholars interested in medieval bureaucracy and the history of law.