The Mediaeval Journal

St Augustine believed that, in the Garden of Eden, being fruitful and multiplying would have involved a form of robotic, desire-free sex. That view is often quoted as if it had passed, uncontested, from one generation of medieval theologians to the next. In fact, the schoolmen quoted Augustine respectfully whilst diverging radically from his thought. They supposed that sexual pleasure would have been experienced by Adam and Eve; for them the issue was, how much? Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, in contrast with Bonaventure, thought that such pleasure would have been more ‘intense’ than it is nowadays, in the fallen world. This debate constitutes a quite significant shift within the history of emotion. Placing physical desire in Paradise was to affirm its fundamental and foundational goodness.

This article considers the current functions of palaeography particularly as these relate to its study in Britain and occasionally more widely. It assesses some of the limits to the roles that palaeography can fruitfully fulfill and examines some of its possible misapplications in recent manuscript study and possible fruitful ways forward.

This article undertakes a fresh appraisal of the marginal images found on one of the most unusual pages in the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, with particular attention being paid to the bas-de-page tableau of a man dressed as a scholar attempting to catch birds. The scene is in many ways inherently incongruous, but I contend that it can also be directly linked to the subject matter of the principal miniature on the page - that of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. Citing evidence from a variety of sources, both visual and textual, I argue that the iconography of the fowler suggests strongly that the Devil is intended: the arch-enemy, not only of mankind in general, but also of the newly incarnate Christ.

Prayer beads have often been associated with women or a gendered form of piety, but little work has been done on exploring why this assumption has been made, or why and how the link was perpetuated. This article not only uses statistics to substantiate the connection but also explores some of the reasons behind it. Using a sample of wills from Lincolnshire in the period 1505–1534, the article undertakes qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore this connection and to examine the importance of these objects for their owners. It explores the significance of prayer beads for women in life in order to understand better what a testamentary bequest of such objects might have meant both for testator and recipient. Ultimately this article demonstrates that wills were places where the gendered nature of these objects was recorded, created and reinforced and, more broadly, shows the significance of prayer beads as ‘women’s goods’.

Non-adult dental disease has the potential to inform us about childhood in the past, including factors such as oral health, oral hygiene, diet, nutrition, subsistence practices, social status, and temporal changes. Adult dental disease has been well studied in medieval skeletal remains. However, dental disease in non-adults has been largely overlooked. This has led to a significant misdiagnosis of non-adult dental diseases, as well as an overall paucity of comparable datasets. This study synthesizes and analyses skeletal data from 2,613 non-adult skeletons (individuals up to sixteen years of age) from fifty sites in England ad 1000-1700. This study aimed to fill in the gap in the current bioarchaeological data for non-adult dental disease prevalence rates in medieval England. It also aimed to assess evidence for temporal trends in dental disease, specifically, in non-adults which may relate to broader social changes. Strong trends in the datasets were observed, with a particularly striking change occurring around the period of the dissolution of the monasteries and the English Reformation in the sixteenth century. Chronological and spatial variation was present, but overall, dental health was found to decline from the eleventh through to the seventeenth century. It was concluded that specific non-adult dental disease methods are evidently needed in order to record and analyse sufficiently any such data.