Bronach Kane – författare

Based on close readings of both public and private documents – court records, churchwarden accounts, depositions, diaries, letters and pamphlets – this collection of essays presents the largely untold story of non-elite women and their dealings with the law.

An exploration of the influence of gender on the workings of memory in the Middle Ages, focussing on the non-elite.WINNER of the Women's History Network 2020 Book PrizeChurch court records offer the most detailed records of everyday life in medieval England for people below the level of the elite. Vivid testimony in cases of marriage, insult, and debt, as well as tithes, testaments and ecclesiastical rights, show how men and women thought about the past and presented their own histories.While previous studies of memory in this period have tended to explore formal memory techniques in the schools and monasteries, this book turns to lay contexts instead, considering for the first time how gender influenced the ways that "ordinary" men and women remembered past events in the centuries leading up to the Reformations. Drawing on legal depositions, supplemented by pastoralia, literature and lyrics, the author argues that despite the many constraints upon their actions, lower-status men and women could use the law to communicate complex and varied pasts. She addresses the legal and religious developments that generated these memories, charting how gender shaped depictions of courtship, sexuality and childbirth, marriage and widowhood,as well as custom and the landscape. The book analyses these themes through the lens of gender and subjectivity, challenging conventional narratives that have aligned female remembrance with domesticity while embedding male memory in the public sphere. This approach offers precious evidence of the gendered, moral, and emotional worlds of lower-status people in medieval England. BRONACH C. KANE is Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University.

An exploration of the influence of gender on the workings of memory in the Middle Ages, focussing on the non-elite.WINNER of the Women's History Network 2020 Book PrizeChurch court records offer the most detailed records of everyday life in medieval England for people below the level of the elite. Vivid testimony in cases of marriage, insult, and debt, as well as tithes, testaments and ecclesiastical rights, show how men and women thought about the past and presented their own histories.While previous studies of memory in this period have tended to explore formal memory techniques in the schools and monasteries, this book turns to lay contexts instead, considering for the first time how gender influenced the ways that "ordinary" men and women remembered past events in the centuries leading up to the Reformations. Drawing on legal depositions, supplemented by pastoralia, literature and lyrics, the author argues that despite the many constraints upon their actions, lower-status men and women could use the law to communicate complex and varied pasts. She addresses the legal and religious developments that generated these memories, charting how gender shaped depictions of courtship, sexuality and childbirth, marriage and widowhood,as well as custom and the landscape. The book analyses these themes through the lens of gender and subjectivity, challenging conventional narratives that have aligned female remembrance with domesticity while embedding male memory in the public sphere. This approach offers precious evidence of the gendered, moral, and emotional worlds of lower-status people in medieval England.

Law and religion, as a subdiscipline of law, has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, the complex relationship between law and religion cannot be fully understood with reference to legal research alone. This Research Handbook includes provocative chapters from experts on a range of concepts, perspectives and theories, drawing on a variety of disciplines, which can be used to further law and religion scholarship.Featuring chapters written by authors from a diverse range of backgrounds, the Handbook focuses on five main perspectives on law and religion: historical, philosophical, sociological, theological and comparative. Each chapter provides a new way of looking at law and religion which can complement and enhance a doctrinal legal understanding of the topic. Crucially, this Handbook also highlights the importance of recognising doctrinal legal study as an approach in itself, which will shape research questions and outputs accordingly.Providing an engaging and thoughtful introduction to the range of interdisciplinary approaches that can be taken to law and religion, this Handbook will be of interest to scholars in law and religion, theologians, sociologists, legal historians and political scientists. It will provide a rich foundation for future interdisciplinary research in this important area of study.Contributors include: L.G. Beaman, L. Bell, P. Billingham, C.G. Brown, J. Burnside, J. Chaplin, B. Clark, D. Dabby, N. Doe, D. Ezzy, M.A. Failinger, P. Fitzpatrick, D.J. Hill, B.C. Kane, J. Machielson, M. McIvor, T. Modood, P. Monti, A. Nazir, J. Neoh, L. Öztig, D. Perfect, S. Perfect, C. Roberts, R. Sandberg, S. Thompson, M. Travers, C. Ungureanu, D. Whistler, J. Yorke