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  3. Cambridge Library Collection - Medieval History

This series includes pioneering editions of medieval historical accounts by eye-witnesses and contemporaries, collections of source materials such as charters and letters and works that applied new historiographical methods to the interpretation of the European middle ages. The nineteenth century saw an upsurge of interest in medieval manuscripts, texts and artefacts, and the enthusiastic efforts of scholars and antiquaries made a large body of material available in print for the first time. Although many of the analyses have been superseded, they provide fascinating evidence of the academic practices of their time, while a considerable number of texts have still not been re-edited and are still widely consulted.

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211 results in Cambridge Library Collection - Medieval History

Page 7 of 11

The Saxons in England
  • A History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest
  • Volume 2
  • John Mitchell Kemble
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    10 November 2011
    First published in:
    1849
  • This monumental 1849 publication was the first detailed analysis to compare Anglo-Saxon institutions with those of other Germanic peoples. The philologist and historian Kemble (1807–57) was born into a renowned family of actors, trained at Cambridge for both the bar and the church, but devoted his career to Germanic philology and Old English. His studies resulted in several books including a Beowulf edition (1833), a pioneering six-volume edition of Anglo-Saxon charters (Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, 1839–48), and the posthumous Horae Ferales (1863), together with articles and translations in periodicals. He also corresponded for many years with Jacob Grimm. The Saxons drew heavily on Kemble's work on the charters. Volume 2 discusses how England changed under the Saxons, focusing on the powers and functions of the king, the ruling elite and the clergy, the role of the urban and rural population, and the situation of the poor.

Medieval English Nunneries
  • c.1275 to 1535
  • Eileen Power
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    31 October 2010
    First published in:
    1922
  • Eileen Power, best known for her posthumously published Medieval Women, was one of the foremost scholars of medieval economic and social history in the first half of the twentieth century. This 1922 work is a substantial study of medieval English nunneries between 1275 and 1535. Power examines in depth who entered the convents, how they were organised, their finances, activities and problems. Although medieval nunneries were significantly poorer and less well documented than the monastic houses, Power uses the available sources to build up a multifaceted picture of medieval life. Her arguments are firmly rooted in documentary evidence, but are presented in an extremely accessible and engaging style. The book reveals that convent life was not particularly ascetic or learned, and that in poorer houses the nuns had to find additional sources of income. Power's account of their methods of coping makes fascinating reading.

Chapters on Mental Physiology
  • Henry Holland
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    20 October 2011
    First published in:
    1852
  • Sir Henry Holland (1788–1873), physician and travel writer, was one of the best known and sought-after doctors in nineteenth-century Britain. He was medical attendant to Queen Caroline, the wife of George IV, and was appointed physician-extraordinary to Queen Victoria on her accession in 1837. Holland also counted six British prime ministers among his patients. He received honorary degrees from Oxford and Harvard, and served as president of the Royal Society three times. First published in 1852, Holland's book on mental physiology explores the medical links between mind and body, including the ways in which sleep, insanity, memory, age, instincts, and habits affect the human body and nervous system. Parts of this work also appeared in Holland's earlier publication, Medical Notes and Reflections (1839). While many of the theories on which he writes (such as phrenology) have since been discredited, Holland's book remains an intriguing insight into Victorian medical science.

Medieval France
  • A Companion to French Studies
  • Edited by Arthur Augustus Tilley
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    31 October 2010
    First published in:
    1922
  • Arthur Tilley (1851–1942) was a British linguist and historian specialising in the literature of the French Renaissance. He was a Fellow of Kings's College, Cambridge, and was appointed Lecturer in French in 1896. This edited volume, first published in 1922, provides an overview of changes in French society between 987 and 1500. Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of that society and was written by a specialist in the field. The architecture, literature, industries and commerce, and political and military history of medieval France are discussed in detail; shorter chapters deal with more specialist topics, such as the evolution of the French language and developments in sculpture during this period. This arrangement allows for a depth of discussion and detail on these topics, providing a comprehensive review of medieval French culture and society.

British Borough Charters 1307–1660
  • Edited by Martin Weinbaum
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    31 October 2010
    First published in:
    1943
  • This volume is a continuation of Adolpus Ballard's study of medieval borough charters, British Borough Charters 1042–1216, continued in British Borough Charters 1216–1307, edited by Professor James Tait. Martin Weinbaum was an American historian who worked closely with Professor Tait during a stay in Manchester between 1933 and 1938, publishing this further continuation in 1943. Weinbaum discovered that after 1660 borough charters lost the individuality present in the medieval period, and this led him to end his analysis at 1660 instead of at 1835 as Ballard had planned. As a result of this increasing uniformity, Weinbaum also adopted a radically different scheme compared to the previous volumes, discussing the spread of uniformity in a shorter first section. An expanded second part provides a brief description of charter rights for individual boroughs, arranged by county, showing examples of increasing uniformity and listing where these examples can be found.

The Paston Letters, A.D. 1422–1509
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by James Gairdner
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    02 September 2010
    First published in:
    1904
  • Archivist and historian James Gairdner, C.B. (1828–1912) began his career in the Public Record Office at 18 and retired as assistant keeper forty-seven years later. The author of numerous historical works, Gairdner is best-known for his archival and editorial work, which forms his most significant contributions to historical scholarship. He oversaw almost entirely the publication of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. The Paston Letters represent a similarly important work. The Letters reveal the fortunes of the Norfolk Paston family and of their tumultuous times. Beginning in the reign of Henry V and continuing through the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII, the Letters are of great interest to early modern historians and literary critics. Volume 1 includes a preface and the highly-praised Introduction, which provides a near-exhaustive and invaluable study of the letters' historical context.

The Royal Charters of the City of Lincoln
  • Henry II to William III
  • Translated by Walter de Gray Birch
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    26 August 2010
    First published in:
    1911
  • Lincoln was one of the wealthiest English cities from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, although it subsequently declined. This 1911 volume edited by Walter de Gray Birch contains transcripts and translations of the royal charters issued to the city of Lincoln between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The introduction discusses the physical condition, content, and importance of the charters, and the necessity for their preservation and publication as the foundations of modern civic democracy. The charters cover a wide range of topics, including protecting the guilds from outside competition, permitting the election of civic officers, allowing building work, and the holding of regular markets. The city authorities were diligent in getting charters and privileges confirmed by successive monarchs, which preserved the content of early, now lost, documents. Although the translations do contain some errors and misunderstandings of the original, this is a valuable collection of documents on city administration.

Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century
  • John R. H. Moorman
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    26 August 2010
    First published in:
    1955
  • J. R. H. Moorman was one of the foremost Anglican scholars of the English church in the middle ages, and especially of the Franciscan order. First published in 1945, Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century provides a social history of the medieval English church. Two per cent of the population were then in religious orders of some kind, and church authority was at least as powerful as that of the state for the rest of the population. In the first part of the book, Moorman uses original sources to give a picture of the life of the secular clergy, their organisation, finances, training, and the different roles they filled with regard to the laity. The second part concentrates on the monastic orders, arguing that, with the exception of the friars, the great days of the monasteries were over, and that they had entered a period of consolidation and inevitable decline.

Diplomata et Chartae Merovingicae Aetatis in Archivo Franciae Asservata
  • Anonymous
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    10 November 2011
    First published in:
    1848
  • This collection of 48 Latin documents dating from the sixth to the ninth centuries was published anonymously in Paris in 1848, when its focus on St Denis, the burial place of the French kings, would have been highly politically sensitive. Many of the charters relate to land, revenues or rights given by Merovingian and Carolingian kings to religious institutions near Paris closely connected to their dynasty. Subjects include Childebert I's foundation of the abbey of St Vincent in 558, donating fields, meadows, forests, fisheries and mills on the River Seine, and grants to St Denis from benefactors including Chlotharus II in 527, Dagobert I in 637, Childebert III in 710 (the taxes on a market) and Chilperichus II in 716–7 (100 cows and a forest). Writings by Pope Nicholas I and a Byzantine emperor also appear. The book provides valuable information about land and power in early medieval France.

Early Wars of Wessex
  • Being Studies from England’s School of Arms in the West
  • Albany F. Major
  • Edited by Charles W. Whistler
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    02 November 2010
    First published in:
    1913
  • This 1913 book was considered ground-breaking on first publication. While there are few documentary sources for Anglo-Saxon history, Major uses his intimate knowledge of the geography of the West County to re-interpret the surviving records. By examining physical and archaeological evidence, he sheds new light on the foundation and development of the kingdom of Wessex. He also uses modern boundaries, place names and local traditions, previously overlooked by scholars, to understand how Wessex history was shaped. He shows how the kingdom was first established, and its boundaries extended through warfare with its neighbours, between the late fifth to eighth centuries. Thereafter, famously led by Alfred the Great, Wessex fought and survived Viking invasions; but eventually fell to the Normans in 1066. Although much new archaeological evidence has been uncovered since the book was written, it continues to demonstrate the significance of landscape and folklore study to history.

The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages
  • Volume 1, Salerno, Bologna, Paris
  • Hastings Rashdall
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    02 November 2010
    First published in:
    1895
  • Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924) first published The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages in 1895. It has remained one of the best-known studies of the great medieval universities for over a century. Volume 1 contains detailed studies of the universities of Salerno, Bologna and Paris with in-depth analysis of their origins and constitutions, institutional development and specialised curriculum. It also includes sections on what a medieval university was; the learning and curriculum of the Dark Ages; the twelfth-century Renaissance; the respective places of Plato and Aristotle in the medieval curriculum; the development of Scholasticism; and the figures of Peter Abelard, Peter the Lombard, and John of Salisbury. Rashdall's study was one of the first comparative works on the subject. Its scope and breadth has ensured its place as a key work of intellectual history, and an indispensable tool for the study of the educational organisation of the Middle Ages.

The Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor 1086–1565
  • Frances Gardiner Davenport
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    31 October 2010
    First published in:
    1906
  • This highly detailed analysis of the medieval records of Forncett Manor, first published in 1906, is a case study of the development of an agricultural estate from early medieval to Tudor times. The economic system of the manor and the people who depended on it, aristocrats, tenants and serfs, is described and statistics are given where they can be extrapolated from the surviving records. Appendices list and transcribe important sections of the archive, including lists of tenants and financial records, as well as relevant passages of the Domesday Book. Starting from the documentary evidence, Harvard-trained Davenport does not speculate beyond the facts and offers little interpretation. However, she creates a highly instructive case study for medieval economic history that remains a rich source of valuable information for historians of later generations.

British Borough Charters 1216–1307
  • Edited by Adolphus Ballard, James Tait
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    31 October 2010
    First published in:
    1923
  • This volume is a continuation of Adolphus Ballard's study of medieval borough charters, British Borough Charters 1042–1216. After Ballard's death in 1915, completion of his work was undertaken by Professor James Tait, (1862–1944) and first published in 1923. Tait follows Ballard's structure from his previous work and divides this volume into two parts. In the first part Tait analyses a comprehensive collection of borough documents and charters dating from between 1216 and 1307 to examine changes in the development of boroughs, burgage and mercantile privileges, and the effect of the growth in trade and trade regulation during this period. Differences between borough charters in the twelfth and the thirteenth century are also discussed. The second half of this volume provides extensive examples of borough documents in Latin, with English translations, including examples of borough formation, jurisdictional, mercantile and tenurial privileges and the development of public services.

The Growth of the Manor
  • Paul Vinogradoff
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    31 October 2010
    First published in:
    1905
  • The Growth of the Manor (1905) is one of the key works of the eminent expatriate Russian jurist, Paul Vinogradoff (1854–1925). Expanding on his Oxford lectures, this book attempts to re-establish coherence within English medieval history after the critiques of scholars including Frederic Maitland had supposedly obscured the historical narrative. Tracing the evolution of the manor, Vinogradoff demonstrates how feudal law and tenurial relationships evolved out of more primitive systems of male descent. He claims there was demonstrable progress from a system of communal action and responsibility to one of personal rights and subjection that can be traced through what he calls the 'Celtic', 'Old English' and 'Feudal' periods. The latter system was secured in the Norman Conquest of 1066, although the former continued to exist underneath it. Of particular interest to those studying the Domesday Book, this is also an important text for medievalists and legal historians.

A Late Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary Preserved in the Library of the Leiden University
  • Edited by Jan Hendrik Hessels
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    16 June 2011
    First published in:
    1906
  • Prior to his 1890 publication of the Corpus Christi Latin–Old English MS, also reissued in this series, Jan Hendrik Hessels (1836–1926) had begun transcribing this equally important text, of which his edition was published in 1906. (He explains the delay by referring to 'work of another nature': his monumental edition of the archive of the Dutch Church in London (1887–1897), also now available in the Cambridge Library Collection.) Hessels again provides a thorough introduction, including a detailed physical description of the manuscript alongside its history, provenance, and a wealth of other information. The work contains extracts from various texts and treatises, and Hessels' cross-references to other glossaries demonstrate the importance of the Leiden MS for gloss-literature, and will be of use to philologists, scholars of Old English and medieval Latin, and historians of the medieval period.

An Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary Preserved in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
  • Edited by Jan Hendrik Hessels
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    16 June 2011
    First published in:
    1890
  • This 1890 glossary is an edition of the text of MS. 144 in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, by scholar Jan Hendrik Hessels (1836–1926). Hessels was simultaneously producing a multi-volume edition of the archives of the Dutch Church in London, published between 1887 and 1897, and also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. This was the first edition of the MS in its entirety, though three shorter versions had been produced in 1857 and the 1880s. The glossary comprises two parts: an interpretation of Hebrew and Greek names, and a Latin–Old English glossary. Hessels' thorough introduction describes the manuscript, outlines his methodology and provides extensive tables of the 'organic changes' in the text that he takes great care to categorise and explain. M. R. James describes this work as 'edited…with the greatest care and completeness', and it is much sought after by scholars today.

The Observances in Use at the Augustinian Priory of S. Giles and S. Andrew at Barnwell, Cambridgeshire
  • Edited and translated by John Willis Clark
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    07 July 2011
    First published in:
    1897
  • The Priory of St Giles and St Andrew, Barnwell, was among the earliest English communities of Augustinian canons, founded by the sheriff of Cambridge in 1092. Although little survives of its buildings, its records form a significant source for both Cambridge and Augustinian history. The Observances, translated and edited in 1897 by J. W. Clark, form the eighth book of the late thirteenth-century Liber Memorandorum, also reissued in this series. The fourth-century Rule of St Augustine is a short and general guide to community life, and needed to be supplemented by a fuller set of instructions for the day-to-day running of the complex organisation which comprised a medieval monastery. The Observances provide detail about the roles played by all the officials of the priory and about the daily cycle of work and prayer, and give the modern reader a real insight into medieval monastic life.

The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages
  • Part 2, English Universities, Student Life
  • Hastings Rashdall
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    02 November 2010
    First published in:
    1895
  • Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924) first published The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages in 1895. It has remained one of the best-known studies of the great medieval universities for over a century. Volume 2 Part 2 is a study of the medieval universities of England with special focus on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Rashdall provides an in-depth analysis of their origins and constitutions, institutional development, curriculum and college systems. There are additional sections on English student life; student numbers and intake; universities' relationships with local towns; relationships with local ecclesiastical structures; and a chapter on the importance of the university of Oxford in medieval thought. Rashdall's study was one of the first comparative works on the subject. Its scope and breadth has ensured its place as a key work of intellectual history, and an indispensable tool for the study of the educational organisation of the Middle Ages.

Cartulaire de Saint-Vincent de Mâcon
  • Connu Sous le Nom de Livre Enchainé
  • Edited by Camille Ragut
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    23 September 2010
    First published in:
    1864
  • Edited by Marie Camille Ragut (1797–1870), long-serving archivist in the library of Mâcon in Bourgogne, this cartulary is a collection of local records detailing day-to-day life in medieval France. This version was published in 1864 following Ragut's discovery of an authentic copy in the Mâcon archives, the original long since destroyed in religious riots. The book contains 633 charters that span a period of six centuries, including records on the topography, customs, people, and the rise of the feudal system in Mâcon. Dating from 593 to 1220, the ancient documents are reproduced in their original Latin and are supplemented with French annotations. Ragut's meticulous editorial additions contextualize the medieval documents, particularly her comprehensive introduction which situates the records within a more general history of the region. Detailed and fascinating, this cartulary provides an invaluable insight into the local history of the Mâconnais district.

Some New Sources for the Life of Blessed Agnes of Bohemia
  • Including a Fourteenth-Century Latin Version (Bamberg, Misc. Hist. 146, E. VII, 19): and a Fifteenth-Century German Version (Berlin, Germ. Oct. 484)
  • Walter W. Seton
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    26 August 2010
    First published in:
    1915
  • Walter Seton's 1915 book focuses on one of the key, understudied figures of the early Franciscan movement. Abbess of the Convent of Prague, Blessed Agnes was central to the establishment of the Order of Saint Clare. She presented persuasive arguments to convince the Holy See to permit female Franciscans to live according to their Rule and practise voluntary poverty. Seton's edition, drawn from manuscripts in German libraries, includes the oldest extant Latin version of Agnes' Life together with a fifteenth-century German version and German copies of four letters she received from Saint Clare. Praised in 1916 for its 'admirable thoroughness', this edition sheds new light on Blessed Agnes, whose importance was long overshadowed by her more prominent contemporaries, Saint Clare and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, her cousin. This reissue makes this valuable primary material accessible again to scholars working on Franciscan history and medieval women's spirituality.

Page 7 of 11