Despite attempts to suppress early women's speech, this study demonstrates that women were still actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicit with the patriarchal ideology whilst also undermining it.

Despite attempts to suppress early women's speech, this study demonstrates that women were still actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicit with the patriarchal ideology whilst also undermining it.

What was the interrelation between language, power, and socio-economic inequality in England, c. 1550-1750? Early modern England was a hierarchical society that placed considerable emphasis on order; language was bound up with the various structures of authority that made up the polity. Members of the labouring population were expected to accept their place, defer to their superiors, and refrain from 'murmuring' about a host of issues. While some early modern labouring people fulfilled these expectations, others did not; because of their defiance, the latter were more likely to make their way into the historical record, and historians have previously used the evidence that they generated to reconstruct various forms of resistance and negotiation involved in everyday social relations. Hillary Taylor instead considers the limits that class power placed on popular expression, and with what implications. Using a wide variety of sources, Taylor examines how members of the early modern English labouring population could be made to speak in ways that reflected and even seemed to justify their subordinated positions--both in their eyes and those of their social superiors. By reconstructing how class power structured and limited popular expression, this study not only presents a new interpretation of how inequality was normalized over the course of the period, but also sheds new light on the constraints that labouring people overcame when they engaged in individual or collective acts of defiance against their 'betters.' It revives domination and subordination as objects of inquiry and demonstrates the ways in which language--at the levels of ideology and social practice--reflected, reproduced, and naturalized inequality over the course of the early modern period.

Medieval Englishmen were treacherous, rebellious and killed their kings, as their French contemporaries repeatedly noted. In the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, ten kings faced serious rebellion, in which eight were captured, deposed, and/or murdered. One other king escaped open revolt but encountered vigorous resistance. In this book, Professor Valente argues that the crises of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were crucibles for change; and their examination helps us to understand medieval political culture in general and key developments in later medieval England in particular. The Theory and Practice of Revolt takes a comparative look at these crises, seeking to understand medieval ideas of proper kingship and government, the role of political violence and the changing nature of reform initiatives and the rebellions to which they led. It argues that rebellion was an accepted and to a certain extent legitimate means to restore good kingship throughout the period, but that over time it became increasingly divorced from reform aims, which were satisfied by other means, and transformed by growing lordly dominance, arrogance, and selfishness. Eventually the tradition of legitimate revolt disappeared, to be replaced by both parliament and dynastic civil war. Thus, on the one hand, development of parliament, itself an outgrowth of political crises, reduced the need for and legitimacy of crisis reform. On the other hand, when crises did arise, the idea and practice of the community of the realm, so vibrant in the thirteenth century, broke down under the pressures of new political and socio-economic realities. By exploring violence and ideas of government over a longer period than is normally the case, this work attempts to understand medieval conceptions on their own terms rather than with regard to modern assumptions and to use comparison as a means of explaining events, ideas, and developments.

This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse. Medieval literary fictions and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought.

Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Keene's analysis of sources in terms of both time and place – including her Life of Saint Margaret , translated for the first time – allows for an informed understanding of the forces that shaped this captivating woman.

Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance demonstrates that Boccaccio's puzzling masterpiece takes on organic consistency when viewed as an early modern adaptation of a pre-Christian, humanistic vision.