The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The annals were initially created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great. Multiple manuscript copies were made and distributed to monasteries across England and were independently updated. In one case, the chronicle was still being actively updated in 1154.
The small but influential community of Italians that took shape in England in the fifteenth century initially consisted of ecclesiastics, humanists, merchants, bankers, and artists. However, in the wake of the English Reformation, Italian Protestants joined other continental religious refugees in finding Tudor England to be a hospitable and productive haven, and they brought with them a cultural perspective informed by the ascendency among European elites of their vernacular language. This original and interdisciplinary study maintains that questions of language are at the centre of the circulation of ideas in the early modern period.
Memory's Library - Medieval Books in Early Modern England
“Libraries,” wrote Francis Bacon in 1605, “are as the shrines, where all the reliques of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved, and reposed.” But in Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shaped the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past.
King and Country - England and Wales in the 15th Century
This selection of essays and papers, published variously in Wales, England, France and North America between 1964 and 1990, deals with the fifteenth century. It explores themes in the history of England, Wales and, to some extent, the dominions of the English crown beyond. Such a triple perspective can be instructive for the historian of England as well as for historians of Wales and of the king's lands overseas. Crown, court and capital were the fulcrum of political, administrative and social developments throughout the English realm and its associated dominions, as is illustrated here by the experience of Yorkshire and the north, and the principality and marches of Wales.
Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law, but to achieve different ends.
