Andrew Spencer & Carl Watkins 
Thirteenth Century England XVI [PDF ebook] 
Proceedings of the Cambridge Conference, 2015

Fruits of the most recent research into the ‘long’ thirteenth century.


The idea of uncertainty forms a major theme throughout the essays collected here; they tackle aspects of religious, intellectual, political and social history, highlighting how uncertainty, in many and varied forms, was conceptualized, negotiated and exploited in the particular conditions of the long thirteenth century. A number of the contributions explore understandings of the cosmos and personal salvation, probing the search for certainties on the partof ecclesiastical reformers, practitioners of scriptural exegesis and writers of confessional handbooks; there is also an investigation of the exploitation of ambiguities around the fate of excommunicates. Other pieces turn to politics and society, examining strategies of political legitimation and resistance, the unstable politics of identity, gendered experience and means used to regulate social order. As a whole, the collection thus opens up diverse perspectives on, and approaches to, the experience of uncertainty during a period of rapid and often disorienting change.


Andrew M. Spencer is an Affiliated Lecturer in Medieval History at Cambridge University and a Fellowof Murray Edwards College; Carl Watkins is University Senior Lecturer in Central Medieval History at Cambridge University.


Contributors: Emily Corran, Kenneth Duggan, Lucy Hennings, Felicity Hill, Adrian Jobson, Frédérique Lachaud, Amanda Power, Jessica Nelson, Andrew Spencer, Alice Taylor,

Tabela de Conteúdo

Introduction – Andrew Spencer and Carl S. Watkins

‘The Uncertainties of Reformers: Collective Anxieties and Strategic Discourses’ or ‘The Use of Uncertainty by the ‘Reforming’ Circle of Adam Marsh’ – Amanda Power

Moral Dilemmas in English Confessors’ Manuals – Emily Corran

Damnatio Eternae Mortis or Medicinalis Non Mortalis: The Ambiguities of Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England – Felicity Hill

The Contribution of Thomas Docking to the History of Political Thought – Frédérique Lachaud

Dealing with Inadequate Kingship: Uncertain Responses from Magna Carta to Deposition, 1199-1327 – Andrew Spencer

The Rebel’s Four Dilemmas in the Long Thirteenth Century – Adrian L Jobson

The Daughters of William the Lion and Queen Ermengarde – Jessica Nelson

Simon de Montfort and the Ambiguity of Ethnicity in Thirteenth-Century Politics – Lucy Hennings

The Hue and Cry in Thirteenth-Century England – Kenneth Duggan

Recalling Anglo-Scottish Relations in 1291: Historical Knowledge, Monastic Memory, and the Edwardian Inquests – Alice Taylor

Sobre o autor

Carl Watkins is Professor in British History at Cambridge University. He is a historian of medieval religious, cultural and political history, concentrating especially on the British Isles in the central and later middle ages, who has also written about death and the supernatural in English culture over a longer chronological span (extending over the middle ages and early modernity).