Sebastian Sobecki
Biographic Data
| ID | 1648382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sebastian Sobecki |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sebastian |
| FAMILY NAME | Sobecki |
| SIGNATURE | SOBECKI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5987-1260 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing
The Middle Ages laid the foundations for the long European and Middle Eastern history of voyaging, colonialism, and expansion: the Papal embassies that took over a year of overland travel to reach Mongolia, Ibn Battuta's thirty years of voyaging to Africa and East Asia, or the arrival of European colonialism in the Americas. With a focus on medieval Europe, this is the first book to cover global medieval travel writing from Iceland to Indonesia, …
The Invention of Colonialism
This Element argues that it was not just the application of medieval texts by Richard Hakluyt that made them relevant for England's budding colonial ideology; rather, it shows that these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterise early English exceptionalism and the Elizabethan reach for the Americas. The upshot of the author's argument is threefold. First, Hak…
Towards a Global History of Medieval Travel Writing
The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Eur…
Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition
At the heart of Ryan Perry's Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition lies the relationship between coteries and literary traditions. Such coteries were not just physical, Perry argues, but also imaginary; they occurred over distances, both geographic and temporal. Another way of looking at the pairing of coterie and tradition is to think of synchronic as well diachronic literary culture: how do such bespoke reading an…
No Island Is an Island
Quo vadis , Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography
Linne Mooney’s 2006 article “Chaucer’s Scribe” has profoundly impacted the field of medieval English literature.1 The six essays gathered in this article cluster take stock of what we know, or can know, about Chaucer’s earliest scribes, while weighing in on the axiomatic attribution at the heart of this subject, that of Adam Pinkhurst as Chaucer’s scribe. My essay responds to the cluster with reflections on historical evidence, paleographical met…
Essay Cluster
The Author's Three Bodies
This article takes issue with medievalists’ curated textual practices that coalesce on codicological intentionalism, that is, the implied position of (re)constructing authorial intention through the study of manuscripts and handwriting. Rather than criticize this practice, the article challenges medievalists to come clean about what they are doing, to acknowledge their methodological vantage point and, thus, to admit to investments in the project…
Authorized Realities
This article concentrates on the manuscripts that Thomas Hoccleve used for his translations of the two tales from the Gesta Romanorum in his Series and demonstrates that the account of assembling the Series that Hoccleve’s narrative persona, Thomas, recounts in the framework narrative is broadly corroborated by the surviving manuscript evidence. This article shows that London, British Library, MS Harley 219, a literary manuscript discovered in 20…
Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages, by Arvind Thomas
Perhaps more so than any other medieval English poem, Piers Plowman has encouraged critical approaches that use theology as a locus of literary theory. This highly productive trend continues vigorously, and there is indeed no shortage of perceptive books on the theology of Piers Plowman. Joining an already crowded line-up, Arvind Thomas directs his attention to Church and, specifically, canon law. His book proceeds from the premise that Piers Plo…
A Southwark Tale
During the second half of the 1380s, John Gower, the leading fourteenth-century poet and an acquaintance of Geoffrey Chaucer, was working on his longest English poem, the Confessio Amantis. Chaucer, in turn, is believed to have been writing some of the material that would later form The Canterbury Tales. In addition, Chaucer was probably finishing Troilus and Criseyde, which must have been available before March 1388, at least in part, to Thomas …
Unwritten Verities
Sobecki, Sebastian. Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549. An article from journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 2016, pp. 5-212), on Érudit
Our seas of islands
About the Cover
A man of curious enquiry’
Between 1596 and 1601 J ohn P eyton the Y ounger (1579–1635) travelled to G ermany, B ohemia, P oland– L ithuania, S witzerland, and I taly. His accounts of the Empire and B ohemia are among the most detailed and best informed reports to have survived from the period, yet they are virtually unknown to modern scholarship. Furthermore, he was the author of the celebrated description of the P olish– L ithuanian C ommonwealth, A Relation of the State…
Ecce patet tensus
Among those witnesses of John Gower's works that are known to have been produced during his lifetime, the Trentham manuscript (London, British Library, Additional MS 59495) stands out for its remarkable design as a seemingly planned trilingual collection. The manuscript, usually dated to the first year of Henry IV's reign, exclusively contains Gower's poetry—showcasing his virtuosity in English, French, and Latin. A number of its poems are either…
Edda Frankot. “Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen”
Edda Frankot's monograph makes a clear and intelligent yet concise intervention in the historiography of European maritime law. The book's argument is as simple as it is original: debunking existing opinion, Frankot shows that the Rôles d'Oléron were not universally applied in the urban trading emporia of northern Europe. Instead, cities relied on idiosyncratic combinations of local, customary, and unwritten laws that were occasionally supplement…
John Peyton's A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Accession of King James I, 1598-1603
The anonymous A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Provinces United with that Crowne, Anno 1598 is the most important early account of Poland written in English. Over the last one hundred years, the work has received considerable attention from British, German, and Polish historians. Two different authors have been proposed, George Carew (c.1556-1612) and William Bruce (c.1560-after 1613), but neither attribution has gone unchallenged. This…
Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England
Shannon Gayk's Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England is a timely and detailed study of the complex relationship between religious images and English devotional texts writte
Occasions for Writing
The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages
Essays examining the way in which the sea has shaped medieval and later ideas of what it is to be English.
The Sea and Medieval English Literature
A fresh and invigorating survey of the sea as it appears in medieval English literature, from romance to chronicle, hagiography to autobiography. As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare's Tempest . Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works a…
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend (Arthurian Studies No. 61)
RHIANNON PURDIE AND NICOLA ROYAN (Eds.) Cambridge, Brewer, 2005 ix + 156 pp., ISBN: 1-84384-036-7, £40.00/$80.00 In The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan have br
The Authorship of A Relation of the State of Polonia, 1598
1. Sebastian Sobecki makes so strong an argument for Carew that his cautionary conclusion ("one cannot argue for Carew's authorship with the same certainty with which William Bruce can be excluded"— p. 176) seems unwarranted 2. British and Irish Experiences and Impressions of Central Europe, C.1560-1688 nbsp;By David Worthingto: http://books.google.nl/books?hl=enamp;lr=amp;id=SOigi5uOUlICamp;oi=fndamp;pg=PP1amp;dq=sobecki+medievalamp;ots=BNW4JhII…
Ecce patet tensus
Among those witnesses of John Gower's works that are known to have been produced during his lifetime, the Trentham manuscript (London, British Library, Additional MS 59495) stands out for its remarkable design as a seemingly planned trilingual collection. The manuscript, usually dated to the first year of Henry IV's reign, exclusively contains Gower's poetry—showcasing his virtuosity in English, French, and Latin. A number of its poems are either…
A Southwark Tale
During the second half of the 1380s, John Gower, the leading fourteenth-century poet and an acquaintance of Geoffrey Chaucer, was working on his longest English poem, the Confessio Amantis. Chaucer, in turn, is believed to have been writing some of the material that would later form The Canterbury Tales. In addition, Chaucer was probably finishing Troilus and Criseyde, which must have been available before March 1388, at least in part, to Thomas …
John Peyton's A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Accession of King James I, 1598-1603
The anonymous A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Provinces United with that Crowne, Anno 1598 is the most important early account of Poland written in English. Over the last one hundred years, the work has received considerable attention from British, German, and Polish historians. Two different authors have been proposed, George Carew (c.1556-1612) and William Bruce (c.1560-after 1613), but neither attribution has gone unchallenged. This…
The Authorship of A Relation of the State of Polonia, 1598
1. Sebastian Sobecki makes so strong an argument for Carew that his cautionary conclusion ("one cannot argue for Carew's authorship with the same certainty with which William Bruce can be excluded"— p. 176) seems unwarranted 2. British and Irish Experiences and Impressions of Central Europe, C.1560-1688 nbsp;By David Worthingto: http://books.google.nl/books?hl=enamp;lr=amp;id=SOigi5uOUlICamp;oi=fndamp;pg=PP1amp;dq=sobecki+medievalamp;ots=BNW4JhII…
The Authorship of A Relation of the State of Polonia, 1598
1. Sebastian Sobecki makes so strong an argument for Carew that his cautionary conclusion ("one cannot argue for Carew's authorship with the same certainty with which William Bruce can be excluded"— p. 176) seems unwarranted 2. British and Irish Experiences and Impressions of Central Europe, C.1560-1688 nbsp;By David Worthingto: http://books.google.nl/books?hl=enamp;lr=amp;id=SOigi5uOUlICamp;oi=fndamp;pg=PP1amp;dq=sobecki+medievalamp;ots=BNW4JhII…
The Sea and Medieval English Literature
A fresh and invigorating survey of the sea as it appears in medieval English literature, from romance to chronicle, hagiography to autobiography. As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare's Tempest . Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works a…
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend (Arthurian Studies No. 61)
RHIANNON PURDIE AND NICOLA ROYAN (Eds.) Cambridge, Brewer, 2005 ix + 156 pp., ISBN: 1-84384-036-7, £40.00/$80.00 In The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan have br
The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages
Essays examining the way in which the sea has shaped medieval and later ideas of what it is to be English.
Occasions for Writing
Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England
Shannon Gayk's Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England is a timely and detailed study of the complex relationship between religious images and English devotional texts writte
Edda Frankot. “Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen”
Edda Frankot's monograph makes a clear and intelligent yet concise intervention in the historiography of European maritime law. The book's argument is as simple as it is original: debunking existing opinion, Frankot shows that the Rôles d'Oléron were not universally applied in the urban trading emporia of northern Europe. Instead, cities relied on idiosyncratic combinations of local, customary, and unwritten laws that were occasionally supplement…
John Peyton's A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Accession of King James I, 1598-1603
The anonymous A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Provinces United with that Crowne, Anno 1598 is the most important early account of Poland written in English. Over the last one hundred years, the work has received considerable attention from British, German, and Polish historians. Two different authors have been proposed, George Carew (c.1556-1612) and William Bruce (c.1560-after 1613), but neither attribution has gone unchallenged. This…
A man of curious enquiry’
Between 1596 and 1601 J ohn P eyton the Y ounger (1579–1635) travelled to G ermany, B ohemia, P oland– L ithuania, S witzerland, and I taly. His accounts of the Empire and B ohemia are among the most detailed and best informed reports to have survived from the period, yet they are virtually unknown to modern scholarship. Furthermore, he was the author of the celebrated description of the P olish– L ithuanian C ommonwealth, A Relation of the State…
Ecce patet tensus
Among those witnesses of John Gower's works that are known to have been produced during his lifetime, the Trentham manuscript (London, British Library, Additional MS 59495) stands out for its remarkable design as a seemingly planned trilingual collection. The manuscript, usually dated to the first year of Henry IV's reign, exclusively contains Gower's poetry—showcasing his virtuosity in English, French, and Latin. A number of its poems are either…
Unwritten Verities
Sobecki, Sebastian. Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549. An article from journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 2016, pp. 5-212), on Érudit
Our seas of islands
About the Cover
A Southwark Tale
During the second half of the 1380s, John Gower, the leading fourteenth-century poet and an acquaintance of Geoffrey Chaucer, was working on his longest English poem, the Confessio Amantis. Chaucer, in turn, is believed to have been writing some of the material that would later form The Canterbury Tales. In addition, Chaucer was probably finishing Troilus and Criseyde, which must have been available before March 1388, at least in part, to Thomas …
Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages, by Arvind Thomas
Perhaps more so than any other medieval English poem, Piers Plowman has encouraged critical approaches that use theology as a locus of literary theory. This highly productive trend continues vigorously, and there is indeed no shortage of perceptive books on the theology of Piers Plowman. Joining an already crowded line-up, Arvind Thomas directs his attention to Church and, specifically, canon law. His book proceeds from the premise that Piers Plo…
The Author's Three Bodies
This article takes issue with medievalists’ curated textual practices that coalesce on codicological intentionalism, that is, the implied position of (re)constructing authorial intention through the study of manuscripts and handwriting. Rather than criticize this practice, the article challenges medievalists to come clean about what they are doing, to acknowledge their methodological vantage point and, thus, to admit to investments in the project…
Authorized Realities
This article concentrates on the manuscripts that Thomas Hoccleve used for his translations of the two tales from the Gesta Romanorum in his Series and demonstrates that the account of assembling the Series that Hoccleve’s narrative persona, Thomas, recounts in the framework narrative is broadly corroborated by the surviving manuscript evidence. This article shows that London, British Library, MS Harley 219, a literary manuscript discovered in 20…
No Island Is an Island
Quo vadis , Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography
Linne Mooney’s 2006 article “Chaucer’s Scribe” has profoundly impacted the field of medieval English literature.1 The six essays gathered in this article cluster take stock of what we know, or can know, about Chaucer’s earliest scribes, while weighing in on the axiomatic attribution at the heart of this subject, that of Adam Pinkhurst as Chaucer’s scribe. My essay responds to the cluster with reflections on historical evidence, paleographical met…
Essay Cluster
The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing
The Middle Ages laid the foundations for the long European and Middle Eastern history of voyaging, colonialism, and expansion: the Papal embassies that took over a year of overland travel to reach Mongolia, Ibn Battuta's thirty years of voyaging to Africa and East Asia, or the arrival of European colonialism in the Americas. With a focus on medieval Europe, this is the first book to cover global medieval travel writing from Iceland to Indonesia, …
The Invention of Colonialism
This Element argues that it was not just the application of medieval texts by Richard Hakluyt that made them relevant for England's budding colonial ideology; rather, it shows that these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterise early English exceptionalism and the Elizabethan reach for the Americas. The upshot of the author's argument is threefold. First, Hak…
Towards a Global History of Medieval Travel Writing
The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Eur…
Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition
At the heart of Ryan Perry's Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition lies the relationship between coteries and literary traditions. Such coteries were not just physical, Perry argues, but also imaginary; they occurred over distances, both geographic and temporal. Another way of looking at the pairing of coterie and tradition is to think of synchronic as well diachronic literary culture: how do such bespoke reading an…
History (14 works) · Art (11 works) · History (11 works) · Medieval Literature and History (11 works) · Literature (9 works) · Classics (8 works) · Classics (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works)