1st Edition
The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt
The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt charts the history of medieval rebellion from Spain to Bohemia and from Italy to England, and includes chapters spanning the centuries between Imperial Rome and the Reformation. Drawing together an international group of leading scholars, chapters consider how uprisings worked, why they happened, whom they implicated, what they meant to contemporaries, and how we might understand them now.
This collection builds upon new approaches to political history and communication, and provides new insights into revolt as integral to medieval political life. Drawing upon research from the social sciences and literary theory, the essays use revolts and their sources to explore questions of meaning and communication, identity and mobilization, the use of violence and the construction of power. The authors emphasize historical actors’ agency, but argue that access to these actors and their actions is mediated and often obscured by the texts that report them.
Supported by an introduction and conclusion which survey the previous historiography of medieval revolt and envisage future directions in the field, The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt will be an essential reference for students and scholars of medieval political history.
Contents
List of figures
Preface
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: medieval revolt in context
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Part One ~ Conceptualizing Revolt: Then and Now
1. Writing revolt in the early Roman empire
Myles Lavan
2. Takehan, cokerulle, and mutemaque: naming collective action in the later medieval Low Countries
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
3. The eponymous Jacquerie: making revolt mean some things
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
4. ‘Great and horrible rumour’: shaping the English Revolt of 1381
Andrew Prescott
5. ‘United we stand?’ Representing revolt in the historiography of Brabant and Holland (14th–15th c.)
Dirk Schoenaers
6. An exemplary revolt of the central Middle Ages? Echoes of the first Lombard League across the Christian world around the year 1200
Gianluca Raccagni
Part Two ~ Socio-Political Contexts: Identity, Motivation, and Mobilization
7. Looking forward: peasant revolts in Europe, 600–1200
Chris Wickham
8. Invoking and constructing legitimacy: rebels in the late medieval European and Islamic worlds
Patrick Lantschner
9. Rebellion and the law in fifteenth-century English towns
Eliza Hartrich
10. Women in revolt in medieval and early modern Europe
Samuel Cohn, jr.
11. Popular movements and elite leadership: exploring a late medieval conundrum in cities of the Low Countries and Germany
Justine Smithuis
12. Revolts and wars, corporations and leagues: remembering and communicating urban uprisings in the medieval Empire
Gisela Naegle
Part Three ~ Communication: Language, Performance, and Violence
13. A dossier of peasant and seigneurial violence
Paul Freedman
14. Violence as a political language: the uses and misuses of violence in late medieval French and English popular rebellions
Vincent Challet
15. Developing strategies of protest in late medieval Sicily
Fabrizio Titone
16. Cultures of surveillance in late medieval English towns: the monitoring of speech and the fear of revolt
Christian Liddy
17. Interpreting large-scale revolts: some evidence from the War of the Communities of Castile
Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer
18. Prophetic rebellions: radical urban theopolitics in the era of the Reformations
Phillip Haberkern
Conclusion
John Watts
Index
Biography
Justine Firnhaber-Baker is a specialist in late medieval political history at the University of St Andrews. Her publications include Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250–1400 (2014) and Difference and Identity in Francia and Medieval France (co-edited with art historian Meredith Cohen, 2010).
Dirk Schoenaers has held post-doctoral positions at University College London and the University of St Andrews.
"This handbook provides valuable new insights into popular revolt in late medieval Europe, providing a strong focus on the political context and how collective anger was increasing fomented by concerns about the credibility and legitimacy of ruling elites. The editors have drawn together an impressive group of scholars whose stimulating contributions will become essential reading for academics and students alike."
James Davis, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
