The convocation records of the Churches of England and Ireland are the principal source of our information about the administration of those churches from middle ages until modern times. They contain the minutes of clergy synods, the legislation passed by them, tax assessments imposed by the king on the clergy, and accounts of the great debates about religious reformation; they also include records of heresy trials in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of them connected with the spread of Lollardy. However, they have never before been edited or published in full, and their publication as a complete set of documents provides a valuable resource for scholarship. This volume contains all the evidence for convocations and provincial councils during the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, and reconstructs the period from 1328 to 1349, for which the Canterbury registers have been lost. Particularly important is the detailed account of the convocations held in 1340-2, when the clergy first withdrew from parliament and insisted on taxing themselves. There is also an appendix listing all the known clerical proctors sent to parliament from 1295 to 1536.

The registers of Archbishop Mepham and his successor Stratford were apparently lost, or more likely stolen, in the later Middle Ages. Stratford had been bishop of Winchester for some ten years, consequently much more is known about his activity in the episcopal office. Mepham by contrast is somewhat of an enigma. He came into office with an academic training in the wake of Walter Reynolds, who did not attend a university but was experienced in secular affairs and had been a confidant of the king when Prince of Wales. Unusually Mepham was elected by the Christ Church chapter and not provided by the pope. Bereft of political experience, he was unlucky in the time of his promotion, a period of struggle between the Mortimer/Isabella and Lancastrian factions, with the young Edward III a pawn, virtually powerless to influence events. It was only towards the end of 1330 that the king came into his own thanks to a coup dtat. Thereafter Mephams attempts to exert his metropolitan authority and his lack of wisdom in avoiding conflict led to his sad denouement. Fortunately we know quite a lot about his more combative activities thanks to the chroniclers, particularly Dene, the reputed author of the Historia Roffensis, and the St. Augustines chronicler Thorne. In the eighteenth century Ducarel collected a large number of documents relating to the archiepiscopates of Mepham and Stratford, while others have come to light with the publication of the Episcopal registers of his contemporaries. In 1997 my article An Innocent Abroad: The Career of Simon Mepham, Archbishop of Canterbury 1328-1333, was published in the English Historical Review. The Release of Ornaments in the Archbishops chapel and some other arrangements following Simon Mephams elevation, appeared in Archaeologia Cantiana in 2002. Since that time I have examined the Canterbury Act Books relative to that period and prepared an edition of Stratfords Winchester register, which has made it possible considerably to expand the study of Mepham. R.M.H. Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Groundbreaking essays show the variety and complexity of the roles played by inquisition in medieval England. Inquisition in medieval and early modern England has typically been the subject of historical rather than cultural investigation, and focussed on heresy. Here, however, inquisition is revealed as playing a broader role in medievalEnglish culture, not only in relation to sanctions like excommunication, penance and confession, but also in the fields of exemplarity, rhetoric and poetry. Beyond its specific legal and pastoral applications, inquisitio was a dialogic mode of inquiry, a means of discerning, producing or rewriting truth, and an often adversarial form of invention and literary authority. The essays in this volume cover such topics as the theory and practice ofcanon law, heresy and its prosecution, Middle English pastoralia, political writing and romance. As a result, the collection redefines the nature of inquisition's role within both medieval law and culture, and demonstrates the extent to which it penetrated the late-medieval consciousness, shaping public fame and private selves, sexuality and gender, rhetoric, and literature. Mary C. Flannery is a lecturer in English at the University of Lausanne; Katie L. Walter is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. Contributors: Mary C. Flannery, Katie L. Walter, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Edwin Craun, Ian Forrest, Diane Vincent, Jenny Lee, James Wade, Genelle Gertz, Ruth Ahnert, Emily Steiner

As literary scholars have long insisted, an interdisciplinary approach is vital if modern readers are to make sense of works of medieval literature. In particular, rather than reading the works of medieval authors as addressing us across the centuries about some timeless or ahistorical 'human condition', critics from a wide range of theoretical approaches have in recent years shown how the work of poets such as Chaucer constituted engagements with the power relations and social inequalities of their time. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, medieval historians have played little part in this 'historical turn' in the study of medieval literature. The aim of this volume is to allow historians who are experts in the fields of economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual history the chance to interpret one of the most famous works of Middle English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales, in its contemporary context. Rather than resorting to traditional historical attempts to see Chaucer's descriptions of the Canterbury pilgrims as immediate reflections of historical reality or as portraits of real life people whom Chaucer knew, the contributors to this volume have sought to show what interpretive frameworks were available to Chaucer in order to make sense of reality and how he adapted his literary and ideological inheritance so as to engage with the controversies and conflicts of his own day. Beginning with a survey of recent debates about the social meaning of Chaucer's work, the volume then discusses each of the Canterbury pilgrims in turn. Historians on Chaucer should be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval culture whether they are specialists in literature or history.

An introduction to the entire Convocation Records of the Church of England, offering an invaluable survey of this important source. The convocation records of the Churches of England and Ireland are the principal source of our information about the administration of those churches from middle ages until modern times. They contain the minutes of clergy synods, the legislation passed by them, tax assessments imposed by the king on the clergy, and accounts of the great debates about religious reformation; they also include records of heresy trials in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of them connected with the spread of Lollardy. However, they have never before been edited or published in full, and their publication as a complete set of documents provides a valuable resource for scholarship. The introductory volume presents both a chronological and a thematic survey of the English convocations from 1313 to the mid-nineteenth century, with a postscript bringing the account up to the present day. The chronological survey gives a detailed account of each individual convocation; the thematic survey explains the pattern of membership, the procedures and functions of the convocations and their relationship to other legislative institutions both at home and abroad. Detailed statistics, in tabular form, support the earlier sections, and the volume also includes a complete concordance to David Wilkins' Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, for which this edition of the convocation records is a partial replacement.