Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

A set of essays intended to recognize the scholarship of Professor Cynthia Neville, the papers gathered here explore borders and boundaries in medieval and early modern Britain. Over her career, Cynthia has excavated the history of border law and social life on the frontier between England and Scotland and has written extensively of the relationships between natives and newcomers in Scotland’s Middle Ages. Her work repeatedly invokes jurisdiction as both a legal and territorial expression of power. The essays in this volume return to themes and topics touched upon in her corpus of work, all in one way or another examining borders and boundaries as either (or both) spatial and legal constructs that grow from and shape social interaction.
Contributors are Douglas Biggs, Amy Blakeway, Steve Boardman, Sara M. Butler, Anne DeWindt, Kenneth F. Duggan, Elizabeth Ewan, Chelsea D.M. Hartlen, K.J. Kesselring, Tom Lambert, Shannon McSheffrey, and Cathryn R. Spence.

Sara M. Butler, Ph.D. (2001), Dalhousie University, is King George III Professor in British History at The Ohio State University. Her publications include The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England (Brill, 2007), Divorce in Medieval England: From One to Two Persons at Law (Routledge, 2013), and Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (Routledge, 2015).
Krista J. Kesselring, Ph.D. (2000), Queen’s University, is Professor of History at Dalhousie University. Her publications include Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge UP, 2003) and The Northern Rebellion of 1569 (Palgrave, 2007).

''This is a stimulating set of essays that will be of interest to historians of medieval and early modern Britain, and to scholars with an interest in border studies. It is a genuinely British collection, with material from different regions of England, Scotland, and Wales, as well as a number of frontiers. The authors, as a group, set their research in clear historical and historiographical context, making it possible for readers to engage with a diverse set of essays and understand how the papers not only enter into dialogue with Neville’s work but also advance their own fields''.
Morgan Ring, in Canadian Journal of History, 54.1-2 (2019).
"The collection illustrates the value of seeking out the margins in which the mixing of peoples, ideas, laws, and customs produced so many fascinating aspects of British history [...] In all, this book makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of medieval Britain by further diversifying both the subjects we endeavour to understand and the manner in which we examine them. It provides continued evidence of the value of examining margins and borders, and of how these spaces – real and imagined, social and legal, gendered and economic – provide the most fruitful areas for enquiry."
Daniel MacLeod, in The Innes Review, 71.1 (2020).