Featured Articles
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The Precious Bones: The Power of Saints’ Relics and the Legitimacy of Ownership in Einhard’s Marcellinus and Peter
Within The Translations and Miracles of The Blessed Martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter, Einhard captures the awe and reverence that people in the Carolingian world had for the power of the saints and the miracles that they worked. In describing these fantastical miracles, the “reliquary … drenched with blood,” the sweet smell in the city of [...]
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Thesis Gloss: Sanctified by St. Peter: Sicilian-Norman Diplomacy with the Papacy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
My thesis, “Sanctified by St. Peter: Sicilian-Norman Diplomacy with the Papacy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” considered the evolution of the diplomatic relationship between Hautevilles and popes during the period of Norman rule in Southern Italy and Sicily. The work studied all surviving diplomatic documents of the period to reevaluate notions of that relationship. [...]
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Eating Between Memory and History
The relationship between collective memory and historiography has received considerable attention in the past two decades, especially as historians have explored the ways that ideology shapes contemporary memory. Yael Zerubavel, for example, has shown how the collective suicide of the Zealots at Masada in 73CE was reinterpreted by the twentieth-century Zionist movement from the traditionally [...]
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Chaucer’s Criseyde and the Creation of Feminine Space
Recent scholarship on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has become increasingly focused on the character and motives of the text’s heroine, reading the work through her eyes. Although much has been said to counter the previously male-dominated readings of the poem, there is plenty more to say about Criseyde, who has been widely acknowledged as one [...]
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Monks, Demons, and the Human Body
Few Christians have been so tormented by demons as the desert fathers, ascetics who lived in the Egyptian desert in the third through sixth centuries CE. As these early monks struggled to achieve perfect unity with the divine, their constant companions were not their fellow monks, not even their fellow humans. Instead, they were quite [...]
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Interview: Professor Michael McCormick
Michael McCormick is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History and Chair of the Standing Committee on Archaeology, Harvard University. The interview was conducted by Sententiae editor Lauren Tiedemann. Discuss your thoughts on approaching different disciplines from a more holistic view rather than dividing everything separately as has often previously been done. It is true [...]
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For the Glory of England: The Changing Nature of Kingship in Fourteenth Century England
In September of 1399, Henry of Bolingbroke stood before Parliament in Westminster and was proclaimed king, becoming Henry IV of England (r. 1399-1413). Henry had recently staged a rebellion and forced his cousin, King Richard II (r. 1377-99), to abdicate the throne. As Richard had no children, Henry needed only to wait for his cousin’s [...]
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Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Mark: Borders, Transgression, and Grendel’s Arm
Beowulf has always been interpreted in terms of boundaries, whether they lie between Christianity and paganism, the old and young, or the human and the monstrous. Yet the landscape itself — especially as it surrounds Heorot — features very interesting boundaries, even among the wastelands. Grendel, too, is clearly defined as a mearcstapa, a border-walker [...]
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Social Theater and Liminal Ritual in The Battle of Maldon, a Late Anglo-Saxon Poem
Gehyrst þu, sælida, hwæt þis folc segeð? Hi willað eow to gafole garas syllan, ættrynne ord and ealde swurd, þa heregeatu þe eow æt hilde ne deah. Brimmanna boda, abeod eft ongean, sege þinum leodum miccle laþre spell, þæt her stynt unforcuð eorl mid his werode, þe wile gealgean eþel þysne, æþelredes eard, ealdres mines, [...]
