Open research questions in Medieval Literature and History
90 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 5,749 Medieval Literature and History papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Therefore, this scene should be examined comparatively to determine whether those details are entirely fictional or reshaped by the realities of the day. Precautions taken to prevent any harm should be examined to solidify the connections The Code of Duelling: Hiatorical Echoes of Duelling in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale 133 between historical records and literary narration since it is already acknowledged that the Church severely opposed the judicial and chivalric duels due to the increase in the number of deaths of Christian souls.
” (Elisabeth of Bohemia quoted in Shapiro 2007: 100; Descartes 1996 [1897–1913]: 4:269) Drawing on her personal experience (various sorrows, anxieties, and physical pains resulting from the difficulties her family was facing), Elisabeth suggests that reason alone is insufficient for managing the passions.
Middle ages and modernity: Philosophy, science and spirituality of three women who left their mark · 2026 · DOIThe essay focuses on the underexplored Causa 32 in the Decretum and discusses how Gratian very directly addressed forced coitus in that section of his text, both condemning it and exonerating women of all guilt who are forced to have sex without their consent.
Lucretia (and Lucia) and the Medieval Canonists: Guilt, Consent, and Chastity in the Early Canonistic Jurisprudence of Rape: Submission for Law and History Review · 2025 · DOIThat said, the near total destruction after 1789 of Savigny’s buildings, and the often contradictory nature of those written sources by which antiquarians and academics have attempted, in the absence of sustained archaeological work, to reconstruct their medieval layout, mean that a great deal remains uncertain.
THE CHAPEL OF ST CATHERINE AT THE CISTERCIAN ABBEY OF SAVIGNY: ‘UNEARTHING’ AN ARCHITECTURAL ENIGMA · 2023 · DOIThis paper examines the phenomena of voices heard by Joan of Arc the 19 year heroine who managed to rescue parts of France from the English in 1429 I will adopt three different points of view; first the voices as experienced by the subject within a specific sociocultural period, second the voices as interpreted by the church and finally from a psychodynamic point of view limited by the paucity of data available.
The core understanding of the concept tends to boil down to supreme authority within a territory, although the meanings of “supreme,” “authority,” and “territory” remain to be agreed upon (Philpott 2016; Krasner 2001).
Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity · 2022 · DOI1590-1610), we find evidence for this view in our analysis of two clusters of understudied minor characters related to the pleasures and punishment of prodigality.
But even if it were established that-the right hand: surpassed the left, by a gift of nature, in tactile sensibility, strength and competence, there would still remain to be explained why a humanly-instituted privilege should be added to this natural superiority; why only the best-endowed hand is exercised and trained.
The essay argues that accounts of virtue ethics focusing on tradition‐specific views of the human good and practical reasoning are insufficient if they do not also examine how practical reasoning interprets and responds to religious interpretations of time that disclose the distinctive kinds of moral problems arising in each historical period.
The degree to which these counter-gestures constitute agency remains an open question; however, the ways in which such challenges were framed and expressed not only sheds light on larger legitimating social ideals but suggests a gradual but significant shift over the course of the long eighteenth century from a vertical to a more horizontal construction of authority.
God's Hat and the Highwayman's Shoes: A Gestural and Sartorial History of Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century English Trial and Execution · 2012 · DOI’ 7See, for example, Patrick Wormald, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship, from Euric to Cnut’, in Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: law as text, image and experience, London, 1999, 11: ‘Several barbarian legislators, including Alfred, introduced their codes with a paraphrase of the Emperor Justinian's seventh novel to the effect that they were renovating and amending existing law, adding what was lacking and renovating what was superfluous.
But what happens when, according to popular 16th-century belief, "conception" - the ability to generate both intellectual knowledge and biological progeny - is limited to the males of the species? Is the female knight of Chastity an oxymoron? This essay examines Spenser's shift in his representation of Britomart's "virtue" in the 1590 and 1596 versions and the implications generated for the fashioning of both Britomart and her female readers - especially Queen Elizabeth.
This book begins with a quotation from Hobbes's Leviathan in which he maintained that conquerors such as William the Conqueror, who needed not only submission to their authority for the future but also approbation for their past actions, were in effect sowing the seed for the dissolution of their states, for ‘there is scarce a Common-wealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified’.
We may lack evidence for the impact of processions on the population at large, but the rich liturgical sources for Chartres allow Fassler to establish a strong case for the presence of an intense processional life in the city, how often every-day streets must have been transformed into sacred routes.
It suggests that participants in public debate need to be explored on their own terms, rather than as necessarily catspaws of councillors; that there was an emergent Elizabethan public sphere independent of the court which, in holding different attitudes to counsel than councillors, could bring them into conflict with Elizabeth.
COUNSEL, PUBLIC DEBATE, AND QUEENSHIP: JOHN STUBBS'S <i>THE DISCOVERIE OF A GAPING GULF</i>, 1579 · 2001 · DOIThere is, though, a considerable amount of additional material in the rolls of the Justices in Eyre in the reign of Edward I, and in some of the multifarious tracts on pleading which proliferated in the later years of the thirteenth century and which have remained for the most part in manuscripts which have not been systematically examined by legal historians.
Reaching their maximum revenue around 1330, these temporalities were scarcely modified thereafter as regards their composition, but difficulties in the first half of the fifteenth century, which halved the revenue, affected above all the rural elements, so that the proportion of urban revenues — especially dues on commerce — increased.
Whilst this anonymous master and associated writers have been confidently ascribed to the north-west Midlands in the reign of Richard II, the social context of this literary achievement is still inadequately understood.
Sir Gawain and the green knight and the literary achievement of the north-west Midlands: the historical background · 1979 · DOI’ How much credibility was there in this resounding riposte when it was made in 1567, and how much would survive three more decades of Tudor royal supremacy? Not many Nathans in bishops' clothing were prepared to confront monarchy itself with a bold ‘Thou art the man’, and it was scarcely in the Tudor character to confess with King David: ‘I have sinned against the Lord.
<i>If Constantine, then also Theodosius: St Ambrose and the Integrity of the Elizabethan</i>Ecclesia Anglicana · 1979 · DOIForaging detachments used written authorities to requisition supplies, and when money was lacking, issued promissory notes instead of cash to other suppliers. Very occasionally a regular officer, like Shigaev or Mineev, commander of the ’Kazan’ Volunteers’, would be given responsibility, but leadership as well as inspiration by outside intellectual, ’bourgeois’ or clerical elements, other than the possible influence of Old Believer clergy, was lacking.
Paul Friedrnann closed two volumes on Anne Boleyn with the remark that his object had been ‘to show that very little is known of the events of those times’, and the chronicle of the court of Henry VIII will always resemble more a jig-saw with pieces missing than an integrated pattern. But there are clearly advantages to be reaped from further investigation into an area so often abandoned to 96 The Duke of Suffolk explained Gardiner’s escape: ‘We of the council .
More and more states were forced into the position of being unstable, in the sense that the regular revenue was insufficient to pay their troops. Powers lower on the often forced to plunder chart-having more stable revenue-were when taxes and tribute were insufficient to pay the troops (for example, because the standing crop had been seized by marauders).
which permits extensive panoramas. Fragments of an older character remaining in the present, and dubious, wall decoration point to the use of precisely such a device, natural in the context. But it is impossible to determine the value of the evidence furnished by these re-painted fragments; in the same way it is scarcely possible to place any reliance upon the present state of the paintings as a whole. As mentioned above, features have been changed by re-painting on at least two occasions. Through the open arcade, wind and weather had had time enough to cause great damage over a period of some 150 years, and abandoning his customary wealth of detail, Taja refers to the paintings as so many agreeable ruins. But even if we renounce the demand that the present decoration shall harmonise with the original one—agreeing rather that the present system of decoration replaces rather than reproduces the old one—there is still incontrovertible information to be found. The bunches of fruit, certainly newly-painted in their entirety, which hang a little way down from the frame in each wall panel, garlanded by decorative bands, are named by Chattard and are therefore original of their kind.13 Elements very similar to these are found in Pintoricchio's somewhat earlier decoration in the Cappella Buffalini in S. Maria d'Aracoeli. Taken together with Downloaded by [Korea University] at 07:24 25 December 2014 Decoration of the Belvedere of Innocent VIII 41 Fig. 4. The Loggia at Casa dei Cavalieri di Rodi, Rome. Paintings on the rear walls, executed before 1464. the authenticity which the ceiling decoration proves to have, this detail supports the hypothesis that the present decoration does not directly contradict the fundamental traits of the original decoration. Basing oneself on Taja's descriptions, and on these reflections, it may be surmised that the wall panels depicted city scenes in cavalier perspective, but provided with a foreground of a more general kind, probably with figures interposed. It would appear, however, that the present decoration does not entirely follow the 6. — i960. boundary lines of the original one. Chattard mentions that the painted panels are bordered on their lower edges by "un parapetto d'Architettura, dipinto a chiaroscuro", which accords well with more recent decorative schemes of a similar type (Villa d'Esté, Caprarola), but does not tally with the present low threshold which seems to form the conclusion of the frame. But this slight deviation of detail is less important than the fact that Chattard confirms that the frame had the object of creating a false perspective, and this quality it has in its present form.
6 Zupitza came down heavily on the side of the identity of the complete manuscript with the lost 'Rubens manuscript', and decided that there were insufficient 1 See below, n. 1 Professor Meyer, it may be remarked, deserves considerable credit for identifying 'batches' of glosses in the text in its present disordered condi- tion ;2 but further work on the sources of the Vocabulary must surely await a fresh edition of the complete text, in which the various glossary elements are carefully distinguished, and the words printed in their original forms and, just as important, their original order.
* Thus Henry II was scarcely less concerned than Walter Clifford for the defence of Uandovery against the lord Rhys in 1160-2 {cf. In particular it may be expected that further study of charter evidence will add to the number of private castles.
Most-cited papers in Medieval Literature and History
- Ancient DNA, kinship and relational identities in Bronze Age Britain · Antiquity · 2021 · 54 citations
- Types of Eighteenth-Century Literary Patronage · Eighteenth-Century Studies · 1974 · 17 citations
- A Wrinkle in Medieval Time: Ironing out Issues Regarding Race, Temporality, and the Early English · New Literary History · 2021 · 17 citations
- What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328) · Journal of Medieval History · 2007 · 17 citations
- The Influence of Edmund Plowden's Succession Treatise · Huntington Library Quarterly · 1974 · 17 citations
- The pre-eminence of the right hand · Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2013 · 16 citations
- COUNSEL, PUBLIC DEBATE, AND QUEENSHIP: JOHN STUBBS'S <i>THE DISCOVERIE OF A GAPING GULF</i>, 1579 · The Historical Journal · 2001 · 14 citations
- Belle da Costa Greene and the Undoing of “Medieval” Studies · boundary 2 · 2023 · 13 citations
- Marital Practices of the Nahuas and Imposed Sociocultural Change in Sixteenth-Century Mexico · Ethnohistory · 2022 · 12 citations
- The Vanishing Volcanoes: Fragments of Fourteenth-century Icelandic Folklore [1] · Folklore · 2007 · 12 citations
Most recent work
- The Early Novel in the History of Pre-Modern German LiteratureThe Emergence of a New Genre During the Transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period · Current Research Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities · 2026
- Reproductive Pressure and Royal Couples: Medieval England and Scotland, ca. 1200-1400 · Journal of Medieval History · 2026
- Les 'Frances anglaises' (1259-1558) : individus, réseaux, institutions, écritures · OpenEdition (OpenEdition) · 2026
- St Edmund and the Battle of Fornham: The Birth of a Warrior Saint? · Studies in Church History · 2026
- TRADUCTION DE LA FRÁ DAUÐA SINFJÖTLA OU DE LA MORT DE SINFJÖTLI DE L'EDDA DE SÆMUND OU SÆMUNDAR EDDA DU VIEUX NORROIS VERS LE FRANÇAIS · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death · Medieval Mystical Theology · 2026
- Seeing Njáll Clearly: Foresight, Lawful Feud, and Vengeance Through Death in Njáls saga · Knowledge Commons (Lakehead University) · 2026
- Bastard Blood and Chivalric Honor: Illegitimacy, Warfare, and Service in Late Medieval England, 1350-1500 · Open MIND · 2026
- Voicing and Writing Faith: Thematic and Devotional Unities across the Old English Andreas and Vercelli Book · Neophilologus · 2026
- Notes on Sources for Chaucer’s <i>Melibee</i> · Notes and Queries · 2026
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