A wide ranging survey of the medieval secular college and its context.

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

Monasticism in late medieval England, c.1300-1535 provides the first collection of translated sources on this subject. The volume covers both male and female houses of all orders and sizes, and offers a range of new perspectives on the character and reputation of English monasteries in the later middle ages. The first section surveys the internal affairs of English monasteries, including recruitment, the monastic economy, standards of observance and learning. The second part looks at the relations between monasteries and the world, exploring the monastic contribution to late medieval religion and society and lay attitudes towards monks and nuns in the years leading up to the Dissolution. This book is an ideal introduction to this topic for students and scholars. Supported by an extended and accessible introduction this collection of documents gives an unrivalled insight into the last phase of monastic life in medieval England.

This work presents a composite view of medieval English university life. The author offers detailed insights into the social and economic conditions of the lives of students, their teaching masters and fellows. The experiences of college benefactors, women and university servants are also examined, demonstrating the vibrancy they brought to university life. The second half of the book is concerned with the complex methods of teaching and learning, the regime of studies taught, the relationship between the universities in Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the relationship between "town" and "gown".

"One of the most important developments in medieval English literary studies since the 1980s has been the growth of manuscript studies. The thirteen essays in this volume discuss aspects of the design and distribution of manuscripts in late medieval England, focusing particularly on vernacular manuscripts of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries." "This binary focus on secular and devotional texts illuminates shared networks of production and dissemination, and considerably expands current knowledge of regional and metropolitan book production in the period before printing."--BOOK JACKET.

Chantries were religious institutions endowed with land, goods and money. At their heart was the performance of a daily mass for the spiritual benefit of their founders, and the souls of all faithful dead. To Church reformers, they exemplified some of medieval Catholicism’s most egregious errors; but to the orthodox they offered opportunities to influence what occurred in an unknowable afterlife. The eleven essays presented here lead the reader through the earliest manifestations of the chantry, the origins and development of ‘stone-cage’ chapels, royal patronage of commemorative art and architecture, the chantry in the late medieval parish, the provision of music and textiles, and a series of specific chantries created for William of Wykeham, Edmund Audley, Thomas Spring and Abbot Islip, to the eventual history and the cultural consequences of their suppression in the mid-16th century.

The 650th anniversary of the foundation of Wingfield College was the occasion for a special two-day symposium marking the culmination of a three-year UEA-funded research project into the college and castle. The building projects of the late medieval aristocracy focused on their homes and the monasteries, churches or chantry foundations under their patronage where their family were buried and commemorated. This commemoration allowed a visual celebration of their achievements, status and lineage, the scale and prestige of which reflected on the fortunes of the family as a whole. Wingfield is explored in the context of both the actual building of the castle, chantry chapel and the college, and that of the symbolic function of these as a demonstration ion of aristocratic status. The contributions to this book examine many topics which have hitherto been neglected, such as the archaeology of the castle, which had never been excavated, the complex history of the college's architecture, and the detailed study of the monuments in the church. The latest techniques are used to reconstruct the college and castle, with a DVD to demonstrate these. And the context of the family and its fortunes are explored in chapters on the place of the de la Poles in fifteenth century history, as soldiers, administrators and potential claimants to the throne.