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Over the last fifty years or so, historians have largely neglected Gilbert Foliot, the man who was Bishop of London during the 1160s and 1170s, as representative of any larger theoretical position, dismissing his famous polemic letter Multiplicem nobis as the product of envy and thwarted ambition. In this dissertation I argue that Gilbert Foliot was neither out of step with the attitudes of his contemporaries nor driven blindly by anger and envy. Rather, his position was the result of legal training combined with his experience as a cleric in the tumultuous years of twelfth century England. Foliot’s legal training inculcated in him a political theory stressing a bifurcated authority structure in which the clerical and lay “swords” would be drawn to complement one another, but were at the same time necessarily separate and independent. Thus he believed that the Church’s success in its goal of saving souls was reliant on the goodwill and protection of an effective and powerful king. During the Anarchy of King Stephen’s reign, Foliot urged his clerical brethren to unleash the sword of excommunication against barons who committed crimes, and he was frustrated by the lack of coercive power he felt King Stephen ought to have exercised over the rebellious knights who terrorized the countryside. Later, during the reign of Henry II, Foliot feared that the archbishop’s new insistence on clerical superiority would limit the king’s lawful coercive power, while pushing the king to work against the Church rather than with it. Foliot, the jurist, found the archbishop’s argument not only ill-advised, but legally illegitimate and dangerous. Thus Foliot’s diatribe in Multiplicem should be understood not simply as a moment of anger, but as representative of a valid strain of thought in the English clergy, and that the attitude toward the crown on the part of churchmen was more dynamic than historians have recognized. / text

This thesis considers how religious literature represented sickness and disability in Anglo- Saxon and post-Conquest England. Based on Gospel accounts of Jesus's healings, narratives of miracle-cures were highly valued within medieval Christian culture. By analysing a selection of miracle-cure narratives from the main period of miracle writing in England, from the age of Bede to the late twelfth century, this project considers the social significance of such stories. All miracle-cures followed the pattern of a spiritual triumph over the material world, but this thesis focuses on how hagiographers represented human experiences of sickness and disabilities. The first two chapters of this thesis address the conceptual structure of the project. The first explains the two areas of scholarly theory that underpin this thesis. These are the use of narrative sources for historical study; and sociological conceptualisations of bodily difference. The second chapter orientates the case-studies selected for this project in their context. Miracle-cures were recounted in relation to other aspects of the culture of medieval England, most importantly the theology of sainthood and of sin. The remaining three chapters of the thesis provide detailed thematic analysis of selected miracle-cure narratives. The third chapter asks how the spiritual experience of bodily difference was understood. The next chapter considers the physical understandings of a body that was affected by either sickness or disability, and the links between miracle-cure narratives and contemporary medical theory. The fifth and final chapter addresses the representation of social aspects of sickness and disability in these texts, in particular the moralising rhetoric of such texts in favour of community support. This thesis concludes with a discussion of how modern Disability Studies and scholarship on medieval culture benefit from interaction with one another.

The subject of this thesis is Jewish conversion to Christianity in medieval England. The majority of the material covered dates between 1066 and c.1290. The overall argument of the thesis contends that converts to Christianity in England remained essentially Jews. Following a discussion of the relevant secondary literature, which examines the existing discussion of converts and conversion, the principal arguments contained in the chapters of the thesis include the assertion that the increasing restrictiveness of the laws and rules regulating the Jewish community in England created a push factor towards conversion, and that converts to Christianity inhabited a legal grey area, neither under the jurisdiction of the Exchequer of the Jews, nor completely outside of it. Numerous questions are asked (and answered) about the variety of convert experience, in order to argue that there was a distinction between leaving Judaism and joining Christianity. Two convert biographies are presented. The first shows how the liminality that was a part of the conversion process affected the post-conversion life of a convert, and the second shows how a convert might successfully integrate into Christian society. The analysis of converts and conversion focusses on answering a number of questions. These relate to, among other things, pre-conversion relationships with royal family members, the reaction to corrody requests for converts, motives for conversion, forced or coerced conversions, the idea that a convert could be neither Christian nor Jew, converts re-joining Judaism, converts who carried the names of royal functionaries, the domus conversorum, convert instruction, and converting minors. The appendix to the thesis contains a complete catalogue of Jewish converts in medieval England. Among other things noted therein are inter-convert relationships, and extant source material. Each convert also has a biography.