Freedom, Slavery, and England’s Medieval Past
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Joshua Davies
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Joshua Davies is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at King’s College London. He is the author of Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (2018) and co-editor of Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics: Migratory Texts and Transhistorical Methods (2023).
Topics
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Frontmatter
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CONTENTS
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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Preface
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Introduction. Chosen Pasts
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Chapter 1. “Useful Liberty”: Genealogies of English Liberty, the Norman Yoke, and the Anglo-Saxons
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Chapter 2. “Confined to Complexion”: Histories of Unfreedom and Granville Sharp’s Anglo-Saxonist Abolitionism
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Chapter 3. Temporal Bonds: The Kembles’ Anglo-Saxon Family Ties and the Problem of Slavery
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Chapter 4. White Possessions and the “Negro Yoke”: Proximity, Distance, and Communities of Memory at the Butler Plantations
121 -
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Afterword. Intimate Histories: Journeys, Names, Ruins
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Bibliography
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Index
201
