Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Rites of Passage
- Re-writing a Rite of Passage: The Peculiar Funeral of Edward II
- Coming to Kingship: Boy Kings and the Passage to Power in Fourteenth-Century England
- Boy/Man into Clerk/Priest: The Making of the Late Medieval Clergy
- Manners Maketh Man: Living, Dining and Becoming a Man in the Later Middle Ages
- Rites of Passage in French and English Romances
- Becoming Woman in Chaucer: ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le meurt’
- John Gower's Fear of Flying: Transitional Masculinities in the Confessio Amantis
- ‘Le moment de conclure’: Initiation as Retrospection in Froissart's Dits amoureux
- Index
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
Coming to Kingship: Boy Kings and the Passage to Power in Fourteenth-Century England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Rites of Passage
- Re-writing a Rite of Passage: The Peculiar Funeral of Edward II
- Coming to Kingship: Boy Kings and the Passage to Power in Fourteenth-Century England
- Boy/Man into Clerk/Priest: The Making of the Late Medieval Clergy
- Manners Maketh Man: Living, Dining and Becoming a Man in the Later Middle Ages
- Rites of Passage in French and English Romances
- Becoming Woman in Chaucer: ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le meurt’
- John Gower's Fear of Flying: Transitional Masculinities in the Confessio Amantis
- ‘Le moment de conclure’: Initiation as Retrospection in Froissart's Dits amoureux
- Index
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
Summary
Rites of passage were a fundamental part of the repertoire of medieval (as they are of modern) monarchy, and played both a symbolic and a substantive role in the making and unmaking of kings. There has been a good deal of work done especially on the religious aspects of these medieval rites, some of it informed by modern sociological and anthropological approaches, and all of it yielding interesting perspectives on the cultural significance of Christian doctrine and Catholic liturgy in the processes of ordered dynastic succession during the Middle Ages. One need say little more in support of the argument that royal inauguration rituals in particular offer special insights into the way that medieval society negotiated the passage of power from one ruler to the next and invested the new regime with the constitutional and moral authority held to be inherent to the office of king. In the present study, however, I want to consider the degree to which those rituals and other associated processes could be disturbed by, or adapted to fit, a particular and potentially anomalous situation: namely, the accession of a boy ruler to the English throne.
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- Information
- Rites of PassageCultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 31 - 50Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004