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History in Flames
To what extent does our knowledge of the past rely upon written sources? And what happens when these sources are destroyed? Focusing on the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, History in Flames explores cases in which large volumes of written material were destroyed during a single day. This destruction didn't occur by accident of fire or flood but by human forces such as arson, shelling and bombing. This book examines the political and military events that preceded the moment of destruction, from the Franco-Prussian War and the Irish Civil War to the complexities of World War II; it analyses the material lost and how it came to be where it was. At the same time, it discusses the heroic efforts made by scholars and archivists to preserve these manuscripts, even partially. History in Flames reminds us that historical knowledge rests on material remains, and that these remains are vulnerable.
Medieval Memories
Who, exactly, was responsible for the preservation of knowledge about the past? How did people preserve their recollections and pass them on to the next generation? Did they write them down or did they hand then on orally? The book is concerned with the memories of medieval people. In the Middle Ages, as now, men and women collected stories about the past and handed them down to posterity. Many memories centre in the aristocratic family or lineage while others are focussed on institutions such as monasteries or nunneries. The family and monastic contexts clearly illustrate that remembrance of the past was a task for men and women and that each sex had a specific gendered role. Memory also involves selection of what should and should not be remembered and its corollary, amnesia, therefore, is discussed. Anchored in the present, memory casts a shadow on the future and thus prophecies form an important component of the cult of remembrance. For the first time in Medieval Memories, tombstones, medieval encyclopaedias and legal testimonies figure alongside moral guidebooks, miracle stories and chronicles as material for the gendered perceptions of the medieval past.
Medieval Chivalry
Richard Kaeuper presents a new analysis of chivalry, re-interpreting it as a fundamental aspect of medieval society.
Women and the Dictionary of National Biography
Gillian Fenwick's book on DNB women subjects and writers shows that anyone interested in women's history might take the Dictionary of National Biography as a starting point. In theory, the DNB covers the lives of all British women worthy of note from the beginnings of history: in practice, there are 1,518 women among 34,533 men. Here too are small but gradually increasing numbers of women writers working as DNB contributors from the late nineteenth century to the present day.Women and the Dictionary of National Biography shows that the Victorian DNB was largely a male domain - proprietor, editors, staff, contributors and subjects. The first volume had 505 biographies, only 35 of them women, ...
