M Butler
Biographic Data
| ID | 9363 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Butler |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Butler |
| SIGNATURE | BUTLER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola University New Orleans |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7712-9035 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Weaponizing Death
This article examines fraudulent homicide accusations against clergymen and their associates from thirteenth-century England, revealing a sophisticated form of lay resistance long before the Reformation. Analysis of inquests de odio et atia (of hate and spite) demonstrates that parishioners creatively exploited the criminal justice system to communicate their discontent with the clergy, resist ecclesiastical discipline, or find a way out of payin…
Crusades and Violence
Engendering carcerality
Reflecting the carceral turn in scholarship, this introduction to a special issue on engendering carcerality explores the difference that gender makes in the history of the carceral in its various forms over time and space. It considers the multiple meanings and spaces of imprisonment, surveillance, and confinement; incarceration of mothers; confinement of sex workers; imprisoning of political prisoners, and reforming of youths, taking account of…
Context Matters
The article was inspired by Justice Alito's selective and often misleading use of the medieval history of abortion law to justify the overturning of Roe v. Wade . Hoping to offer a corrective view of the larger conversation about abortion during the premodern era, this article hopes to drive home a number of points. First, modern authorities need to acknowledge that the word “abortion” ( aborsus ) meant something different then than it does now. …
Peasants Making History
Anyone who owns a copy of Dyer’s Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989) must surely share my experience of having watched the pristine volume deteriorate under the weight of heavy annotation, dog-earing of pages, and the copious proliferation of multi-colored sticky notes. The deplorable condition of my copy of the book is a testament to its usefulness. It is the book that I most frequently loan out to both students and co…
Litigating Women
Even a Compensation Culture has Its Limits
Historians have long argued that arbitration was the preferred means of resolution for most disputes in later medieval England; but does this apply also to the settlement of homicides? Despite the strenuous efforts of the English legal system after the Norman Conquest to force homicides through the royal courts, historians have argued that homicide continued to be settled out-of-court throughout the medieval period. This study examines six cases …
Ionuţ Epurescu-Pascovici, Human Agency in Medieval Society, 1100–1450
"Ionuţ Epurescu-Pascovici, Human Agency in Medieval Society, 1100–1450." Canadian Journal of History, 57(1), pp. 121–122
Acts of Care
Reviewed by: Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey Sara M. Butler Sara Ritchey. Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. xviii + 310 pp. Ill. $19.95 (978-1-5017-5832-4). Historians have long acknowledged the seemingly insurmountable hurdles of studying women’s participation in medieval medical care. While we know that most medicine was practiced domestic…
More than Mothers
Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. …
Impacts of regulatory processes on the experiences of carers of people in LGBTQ communities living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis
Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker’s view of the Middle Ages as an era of hyperviolence, in which governments engaged in democide and civilians lived in terror, is not supported by the evidence. By analyzing Pinker’s sources for the medieval period and providing a clearer understanding of the difficulties involved in extracting statistical data from medieval England’s criminal justice system, this article hopes to demonstrate that Pinker’s thesis about the civilizing…
Legal Plunder
"Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe by Daniel Lord Smail." Canadian Journal of History, 53(1), pp. 97–98
Sacred People, Sacred Spaces
Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners' increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an oft-neglected source. In his 2002 book Selling the Church, Robert Palmer contended that we must turn to the king'…
Abortion Medieval Style? Assaults on Pregnant Women in Later Medieval England
In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island'smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today's youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the solution to the problem was obvious: marriage. An exchange of vows before the birth of the child would avo…
Medieval Domesticity
Medieval Single Women
Medicine's Moving Pictures
Journal Article Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television Get access Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes and Paula A. Treicher (eds), Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Pp. vi + 343. £50.00. ISBN 978 1 58046 234 1. Margaret Butler Margaret Butler University of Essex [email protected] Search for other works…
To Have and to Hold
Cultures of Suicide
Notes1. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); J. Ambrose Raftis, Peasant Economic Development Within the English Manorial System (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1996); Sherri Olson, A Chronicle of All That Happens: Voices From the Village Court in Medieval England (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996). 2. Anne Reiber Dewindt, “Redefining …
Women, Suicide, and the Jury in Later Medieval England
In the year 1397 in the parish of Tuttington (Norfolk), a woman whose name is lost to history, frantic to rid herself of the evil spirit that possessed her, turned to suicide. She attempted first to hang herself, but her husband discovered her while life remained in her body, cut down the rope, and comforted her. A few weeks later she tried once again to hang herself, but the rope broke. As soon as she had regained her breath, she raced to a near…
Local Concerns
When confronted with cases of self‐killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon's goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on the verdicts put forward by members of the jury during the various stages of the legal process. While t…
Degrees of Culpability
Sunday, January 23, 1390 was a day that Ralph Peioun of Wotton (Lincs.) and his wife most likely never forgot. On this day, their one-year-old son, Richard, presumably curious and headstrong like most young toddlers his age, made an unfortunate choice of playthings when he picked up a pair of shears and wounded himself in the throat, a fatal injury leading to his death later that same day
Gendering the Master Narrative
Chronicles
More than Mothers
Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. …
Runaway Wives
Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone's view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as "brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating" has since been called into question, more recent historians have still painted a somewhat unflatteri…
The Law as a Weapon in Marital Disputes
When Isabelle, widow of Richard Vergeons, commissioned the writing of a bill of complaint to Chancery at the end of the fifteenth century, she was clearly at the end of her tether. Six months before the writing of the petition, the wife of Thomas Hyll, a wire monger of London, approached the petitioner's husband, begging for ''secour and saufgarde of her lyf.'' She was driven to this request only after ''dyvers variantes and discordes betwene her…
Impacts of regulatory processes on the experiences of carers of people in LGBTQ communities living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis
Degrees of Culpability
Sunday, January 23, 1390 was a day that Ralph Peioun of Wotton (Lincs.) and his wife most likely never forgot. On this day, their one-year-old son, Richard, presumably curious and headstrong like most young toddlers his age, made an unfortunate choice of playthings when he picked up a pair of shears and wounded himself in the throat, a fatal injury leading to his death later that same day
Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker’s view of the Middle Ages as an era of hyperviolence, in which governments engaged in democide and civilians lived in terror, is not supported by the evidence. By analyzing Pinker’s sources for the medieval period and providing a clearer understanding of the difficulties involved in extracting statistical data from medieval England’s criminal justice system, this article hopes to demonstrate that Pinker’s thesis about the civilizing…
Sacred People, Sacred Spaces
Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners' increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an oft-neglected source. In his 2002 book Selling the Church, Robert Palmer contended that we must turn to the king'…
Abortion Medieval Style? Assaults on Pregnant Women in Later Medieval England
In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island'smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today's youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the solution to the problem was obvious: marriage. An exchange of vows before the birth of the child would avo…
Medicine's Moving Pictures
Journal Article Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television Get access Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes and Paula A. Treicher (eds), Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Pp. vi + 343. £50.00. ISBN 978 1 58046 234 1. Margaret Butler Margaret Butler University of Essex [email protected] Search for other works…
Stories of the Rose
Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages, by Anne Winston-Allen." Canadian Journal of History, 34(1), pp. 91–92
Formations et carrières professionnelles
Une enquête auprès du personnel de l'industrie chimique a fourni des renseignements précis sur l'origine sociale, le niveau d'instruction, l'emploi à l'embauche, l'emploi actuel... Ces données ont été analysées pour retracer, autant que faire se peut, le cheminement professionnel et social des principales catégories de personnel, et reconstituer leurs carrières
NLG 35.00 pbkSimon Miller, Landlords and Haciendas in Modernizing Mexico
Public Order and Law Enforcement
A very welcome book. It deals with a crucial, yet under-studied period in the history of the medieval legal system, and emphasises the interaction of law and society. - English Historical Review. A major contribution not only to legal, but also to political and social history. - History. The final phase in Angevin administrative advances in England was crucial in determining the shape and principal features of England's new judicial system. This …
Stories of the Rose
Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages, by Anne Winston-Allen." Canadian Journal of History, 34(1), pp. 91–92
The Law as a Weapon in Marital Disputes
When Isabelle, widow of Richard Vergeons, commissioned the writing of a bill of complaint to Chancery at the end of the fifteenth century, she was clearly at the end of her tether. Six months before the writing of the petition, the wife of Thomas Hyll, a wire monger of London, approached the petitioner's husband, begging for ''secour and saufgarde of her lyf.'' She was driven to this request only after ''dyvers variantes and discordes betwene her…
I will never consent to be wedded with you
This paper asks us to rethink the boundaries between consent and coercion in medieval England. From gentle persuasion to threats and abuse, coercion was a part of the courtship process. Although late medieval society expected parents to play an active, even heavy-handed, role in matchmaking, the English church recognized the possibility that parents might cross the line between influence and force, and consequently permitted annulments on these g…
Women, Suicide, and the Jury in Later Medieval England
In the year 1397 in the parish of Tuttington (Norfolk), a woman whose name is lost to history, frantic to rid herself of the evil spirit that possessed her, turned to suicide. She attempted first to hang herself, but her husband discovered her while life remained in her body, cut down the rope, and comforted her. A few weeks later she tried once again to hang herself, but the rope broke. As soon as she had regained her breath, she raced to a near…
Local Concerns
When confronted with cases of self‐killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon's goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on the verdicts put forward by members of the jury during the various stages of the legal process. While t…
Degrees of Culpability
Sunday, January 23, 1390 was a day that Ralph Peioun of Wotton (Lincs.) and his wife most likely never forgot. On this day, their one-year-old son, Richard, presumably curious and headstrong like most young toddlers his age, made an unfortunate choice of playthings when he picked up a pair of shears and wounded himself in the throat, a fatal injury leading to his death later that same day
Gendering the Master Narrative
Chronicles
The Boswell Thesis
Runaway Wives
Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone's view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as "brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating" has since been called into question, more recent historians have still painted a somewhat unflatteri…
Cultures of Suicide
Notes1. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); J. Ambrose Raftis, Peasant Economic Development Within the English Manorial System (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1996); Sherri Olson, A Chronicle of All That Happens: Voices From the Village Court in Medieval England (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996). 2. Anne Reiber Dewindt, “Redefining …
Medicine's Moving Pictures
Journal Article Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television Get access Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes and Paula A. Treicher (eds), Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Pp. vi + 343. £50.00. ISBN 978 1 58046 234 1. Margaret Butler Margaret Butler University of Essex [email protected] Search for other works…
To Have and to Hold
Medieval Single Women
Medieval Domesticity
Abortion Medieval Style? Assaults on Pregnant Women in Later Medieval England
In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island'smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today's youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the solution to the problem was obvious: marriage. An exchange of vows before the birth of the child would avo…
Sacred People, Sacred Spaces
Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners' increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an oft-neglected source. In his 2002 book Selling the Church, Robert Palmer contended that we must turn to the king'…
Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker’s view of the Middle Ages as an era of hyperviolence, in which governments engaged in democide and civilians lived in terror, is not supported by the evidence. By analyzing Pinker’s sources for the medieval period and providing a clearer understanding of the difficulties involved in extracting statistical data from medieval England’s criminal justice system, this article hopes to demonstrate that Pinker’s thesis about the civilizing…
Legal Plunder
"Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe by Daniel Lord Smail." Canadian Journal of History, 53(1), pp. 97–98
More than Mothers
Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. …
Impacts of regulatory processes on the experiences of carers of people in LGBTQ communities living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis
Acts of Care
Reviewed by: Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey Sara M. Butler Sara Ritchey. Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. xviii + 310 pp. Ill. $19.95 (978-1-5017-5832-4). Historians have long acknowledged the seemingly insurmountable hurdles of studying women’s participation in medieval medical care. While we know that most medicine was practiced domestic…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (20 works) · History (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Medieval Literature and History (16 works) · Art (12 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · History (11 works) · Criminology (8 works)