Less than a hundred years after Thomas Becket’s martyrdom at the hands of four of Henry II’s knights, his Anglo-Norman mother was transformed into a pagan princess who abandoned faith and kin for Becket’s father and Christianity. Pagès uses this wholly fictional legend about the saint to examine the place and function of conversion and mission in The Man of Law’s Tale, juxtaposing the tale with the legend about Becket’s mother to assess the power (or lack thereof) of baptism in late medieval English works. This new comparative study thus provides productive insights into the complexity of the emergence of the concept of race in medieval English culture and literature.

This reference work examines the ways in which some medieval behaviours and identities were categorized as criminal or deviant. It also explores the implications of modern demonization of the Middle Ages. As well as discussing constructions of deviance, this book further explores the behaviours and identities which provoked these labels and processes. The model is one of reciprocity between behaviours and processes of demonization and criminalization. Each authoritative essay engages carefully with this approach, examining behaviours, the ways they were demonized, and the relationship between the two processes. The three parts of the volume are centred around forms of discursive and normative power—religious ideologies, political ideologies, and legalism. The authors also explore issues of political discourse, spiritual censure, justice and punishment, and the construction of taboos.

After inquisitorial procedure was introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome in 1215 (the same year as England’s first Magna Carta), virtually all court trials initiated by bishops and their subordinates were inquisitions. That meant that accusers were no longer needed. Rather, the judges themselves leveled charges against persons when they were publicly suspected of specific offenses—like fornication, or witchcraft, or simony. Secret crimes were off limits, including sins of thought (like holding a heretical belief). Defendants were allowed full defenses if they denied charges. These canonical rules were systematically violated by heresy inquisitors in France and elsewhere, especially by forcing self-incrimination. But in England, due process was generally honored and the rights of defendants preserved, though with notable exceptions. In this book, Henry Ansgar Kelly, a noted forensic historian, describes the reception and application of inquisition in England from the thirteenth century onwards and analyzes all levels of trial proceedings, both minor and major, from accusations of sexual offenses and cheating on tithes to matters of religious dissent. He covers the trials of the Knights Templar early in the fourteenth century and the prosecutions of followers of John Wyclif at the end of the century. He details how the alleged crimes of “criminous clerics” were handled, and demonstrates that the judicial actions concerning Henry VIII’s marriages were inquisitions in which the king himself and his queens were defendants. Trials of Alice Kyteler, Margery Kempe, Eleanor Cobham, and Anne Askew are explained, as are the unjust trials condemning Bishop Reginald Pecock of error and heresy (1457-59) and Richard Hunne for defending English Bibles (1514). He deals with the trials of Lutheran dissidents at the time of Thomas More’s chancellorship, and trials of bishops under Edward VI and Queen Mary, including those against Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer. Under Queen Elizabeth, Kelly shows, there was a return to the letter of papal canon law (which was not true of the papal curia). In his conclusion he responds to the strictures of Sir John Baker against inquisitorial procedure, and argues that it compares favorably to the common-law trial by jury.