Susan J. Ridyard's Books

The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England

A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults

By: Susan J. Ridyard

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The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England

A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults

By: Susan J. Ridyard

Within Anglo-Saxon England there was a strong and enduring tradition of royal sanctity - of men and women of royal birth who, in an age before the development of papal canonisation, came to be venerated as saints by the regional church. This study, which focuses on some of the best-documented cults of the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and East Anglia, is a contribution towards understanding the growth and continuing importance of England's royal cults. The author examines contemporary and near-contemporary theoretical interpretations of the relationship between royal birth and sanctity, analyses in depth the historical process of cult-creation, and addresses the problem of continuity of cult in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of 1066. An understanding therefore emerges of the place of the English royal saint not only in Anglo-Saxon society but also in that of the Anglo-Norman realm.

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Page Count

360

Publisher

CUP Archive

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521307724

ISBN 13

9780521307727

Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

By: Susan Broomhall

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Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

By: Susan Broomhall

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

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Page Count

246

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

1137531169

ISBN 13

9781137531162

Animal Encounters

Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain

By: Susan Crane

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Animal Encounters

Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain

By: Susan Crane

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal. The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.

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Page Count

281

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812206304

ISBN 13

9780812206302

Transforming Talk

The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England

By: Susan E. Phillips

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Transforming Talk

The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England

By: Susan E. Phillips

In recent decades, scholars have shown an increasing interest in gossip’s social, psychological, and literary functions. The first book-length study of medieval gossip, Transforming Talk shifts the current debate and argues that gossip functions primarily as a transformative discourse, influencing not only social interactions but also literary and religious practices. Known as “jangling” in Middle English, gossip was believed to corrupt parishioners, disturb the peace, and cause civil and spiritual unrest. But gossip was also a productive cultural force; it reconfigured pastoral practice, catalyzed narrative experimentation, and restructured social and familial relationships. Transforming Talk will appeal to a diverse audience, including scholars interested in late medieval culture, religion, and society; Chaucer; and women in the Middle Ages.

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Page Count

250

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271047399

ISBN 13

9780271047393

The Life and After-Life of St John of Beverley

The Evolution of the Cult of an Anglo-Saxon Saint

By: Susan E. Wilson

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The Life and After-Life of St John of Beverley

The Evolution of the Cult of an Anglo-Saxon Saint

By: Susan E. Wilson

This represents the first study devoted to the life and after-life of St John of Beverley. John was bishop of Hexham and then York, after which he retired to his own monastery in Beverley and was buried there in 721. His cult was quickly established and spread to attract pilgrims from all over the British Isles, and even Europe. It was also established in Brittany by the tenth century, especially in the town of Saint-Jean-Brévelay, which is named after him. The great economic wealth of Beverley in the Middle Ages was largely due to it being a major ecclesiastical centre focused around John's relics. His reputation as a powerful saint was harnessed not only to protect Beverley and the surrounding areas and to give succour to pilgrims to his shrine, but also to further the ambitions of successive kings of England to the extent that Henry V raised him to the status of a patron saint of England following the battle of Agincourt, which was fought on the feast day of St John's translation. The hagiographic works on John extend over nearly six hundred years from that written by Bede c. 731, the Vita Sancti Johannis composed by a monk called Folcard c. 1066, then four separate collections of post-mortem miracle stories of the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, and a number of miracles recorded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This span is greater even than the hagiography relating to St Benedict, which had been believed to cover more years than any other collection in Europe. Dr Wilson uses these sources as a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which an Anglo-Saxon saint was promoted over a long period of time by different hagiographers, and how the saint was continually re-created in the image which the hagiographers or his community required, depending on their current needs and perceptions. The volume also includes the first English translations of the Life and the miracle stories.

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244

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351886789

ISBN 13

9781351886789

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid

Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter

By: Luke Fernandez,Susan J. Matt

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Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid

Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter

By: Luke Fernandez,Susan J. Matt

An Entrepreneur Best Book of the Year Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states, but in this lively investigation of changing feelings about technology, we learn that the gadgets we use don’t just affect how we feel—they can profoundly change our sense of self. When we say we’re bored, we don’t mean the same thing as a Victorian dandy. Could it be that political punditry has helped shape a new kind of anger? Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt take us back in time to consider how our feelings of loneliness, boredom, vanity, and anger have evolved in tandem with new technologies. “Technologies have been shaping [our] emotional culture for more than a century, argue computer scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan Matt in this original study. Marshalling archival sources and interviews, they trace how norms (say, around loneliness) have shifted with technological change.” —Nature “A powerful story of how new forms of technology are continually integrated into the human experience.” —Publishers Weekly

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Page Count

473

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674239377

ISBN 13

9780674239371

Book's by Susan J. Ridyard

The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England

The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England

Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Animal Encounters

Animal Encounters

Transforming Talk

Transforming Talk

The Life and After-Life of St John of Beverley

The Life and After-Life of St John of Beverley

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid

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