Parution : Freedom, Slavery, and England’s Medieval Past

Joshua Davies, Freedom, Slavery, and England’s Medieval Past. Anglo-Saxonist Entanglement, ARC Humanities Press, 2025.

A partir d’un corpus vaste, cet essai détaille la façon dont le médiévalisme est employé comme argument de justification de l’esclavagisme dans le monde contemporain.

This book is a study of how ideas drawn from the English Middle Ages have been used to preserve and withhold freedom in the modern world. Broad in scope, it draws on canonical and ephemeral texts, including chronicles, memoirs, novels, political pamphlets, archival material, and works of history by scholars, colonizers, abolitionists, and Lost Cause apologists. Using three generations of a single family to frame its analysis, it reveals an intellectual genealogy that moves from medieval England to modern Africa, the Caribbean, the plantations of the US, and back again, to the academic disciplines of medieval studies and the very fabric of England’s medieval heritage. It argues that England’s medieval past has been a source of tenacious bonds—of family, freedom, slavery, nation, and race—and suggests that better understanding how those bonds were formed and resisted will enable full analysis of their legacy.

 

Table des matières

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction. Chosen Pasts

Chapter 1. “Useful Liberty”: Genealogies of English Liberty, the Norman Yoke, and the Anglo-Saxons

Chapter 2. “Confined to Complexion”: Histories of Unfreedom and Granville Sharp’s Anglo-Saxonist Abolitionism

Chapter 3. Temporal Bonds: The Kembles’ Anglo-Saxon Family Ties and the Problem of Slavery

Chapter 4. White Possessions and the “Negro Yoke”: Proximity, Distance, and Communities of Memory at the Butler Plantations

Afterword. Intimate Histories: Journeys, Names, Ruins

Bibliography

Index

 

Détails et commandes sur le site de l’éditeur.

 


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Justine Breton (1 septembre 2025). Parution : Freedom, Slavery, and England’s Medieval Past. Modernités médiévales. Consulté le 8 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14k0a