‘Nothing but Mayors and Sheriefs, and the deare yeere, and the great frost.’ A study of written historical culture in late medieval towns in the Low Countries and England

This thesis explores urban historical texts from late medieval towns in England and the Counties of Holland and Flanders. The wealth of primary examples discussed in this thesis from England and the Low Countries disproves the conviction long held in the scholarly literature that medieval town chronicles only existed in Italy and Germany. Taking a broader view through the framework of historical culture, rather than a strict definition of (urban) chronicle, many previously ignored urban historical texts are explored. The separate chapters discuss the format, authorship, contents and function of these written examples of urban historical culture. The comparative approach identifies a remarkable level of similarities in variety of format, types of author, use of national narratives and record-keeping traditions between England, Holland and Flanders. Local differences are found in the scope of these elements, but show few fundamental differences. Moreover, when compared to the manuscripts recognised as traditional German and Italian medieval town chronicles, the similarities are also noteworthy. A main thread through the study of all aspects of these written sources is the close link there is between historical and administrative writing in towns. The main group of authors we find are town clerks or secretaries, and town registers and magistrate lists are two major categories of format that we find. The use of these texts was similarly a combination of pragmatic recording and history writing, memorialising past events as well as documents for a legal memory as much as to promote the city’s status

Nation and Compilation in England, 1270-1500

Scholarship has frequently explored how people in medieval England engaged the concept of nation. Scholarship has also investigated the manners in which book production participated in and enacted cultural phenomena. Hitherto, there has been limited consideration of these two concerns together. This is problematic because the manuscripts which carry medieval texts to modern scholars offer the best evidence of contemporary reception of these texts. This dissertation fills this void. It unites questions of compilation and nation in the study of medieval England from 1270 to 1500. It explores the manner in which the collection of works in one manuscript—the manuscript matrix—engages, shapes, denies, or ignores the discourses of the English nation. The dissertation opens with consideration of the textual network of those manuscripts containing one or two tales of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It further argues that such study reveals a political interpretation at the heart of the Clerk's Tale. This dissertation's attention to the manuscript matrix also challenges longstanding proto-nationalist readings of Layamon's Brut and Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur and replaces these with more complicated interpretations of their engagement with nation. Ultimately, the manuscript matrix proves a powerful tool for demonstrating the pluralistic and paradoxical engagements with concepts of nation within late medieval England

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 30th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2021, which was held during March 27 until April 1, 2021, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Luxembourg and changed to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 24 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. They deal with fundamental issues in the specification, design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500

This volume is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts’ healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes’ traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that—though marginalized in modern scholarship—medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations