This chapter distinguishes two ways in which the Middle Ages conceived the relationship between human and nonhuman creatures. The first, according to which humans are a unique kind of animal (in the Latin word’s sense of “living being”), is available primarily to the learned, whereas the second, widely attested in lay usage and practice, concerns the difference (or lack of it) between humans and “beasts.” The chapter explores the complication of both relationships in the French and English romances of William of Palermo (late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century and mid-fourteenth-century, respectively), in which one aristocratic protagonist is turned into a werewolf and others disguise themselves in the skins of bear or deer. Human exceptionalism appears to condition the story’s coding of social dysfunction as animalization, but the romances equally show medieval aristocratic and chivalric identity embracing its proximity to “beasts,” for example, in the notion of sovereignty, in the symbolic languages of heraldry and dreams, and in moments of explicit self-identification. The chapter concludes by arguing that the way these romances build their fiction with reference to animals is materialized in the manuscript books that transmit them, made up as they are of parchment pages, that is, of processed animal skins.

This Chapter tells the story of the author’s Chair – the Royall Chair at Harvard Law School – and of its donor and his marks. Isaac Royall, Jr., was during his lifetime the largest slaveholder in colonial Massachusetts. The Isaac Royall, Jr., brand has risen, and fallen, and risen again, and fallen again in political struggles spanning from his grandfather’s arrival in Maine as an indentured servant, to Isaac Royall, Jr.’s own precipitous flight from Boston after the commencement of the American revolution, to his former slave Belinda’s struggle for her due at his hands in which she denounced him for exploiting her, to Harvard University’s acceptance of his bequest of the Royall Chair, to the University’s adoption of his heraldic shield as a symbol of the Law School, to the conversion of the hagiographical Royall House museum to the Royall House and Slave Quarters, to a years-long struggle over racial justice at the Law School.It is the story of both the fragility and the durability of a brand that is rich in social meaning and unimportant enough to be transformed into the language of ever-shifting contemporary political struggle.It ends in medias res, the author being uncertain what comes next.

This chapter looks at cultural expressions of dynastic consciousness. Some dynasties associated themselves with a particular saint, on occasion one drawn from their own family, as in the case of Wenceslas and the rulers of Bohemia or St Louis and the Capetians, and such family connections were publicly celebrated in images and writing. Murals and statues of forebears conveyed a message of dynastic continuity, and examples can be found from the Carolingian period down to the late Middle Ages, with notable cases being the forty-one statues of kings of France in the royal palace in Paris and the nineteen of the counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon in the royal place in Barcelona. The development of heraldry in the twelfth century presented a new, public and visual, way of expressing dynastic identity, and royal families adopted them early. By the end of the Middle Ages, elaborate coats-of-arms conveyed elaborate genealogical information. Simultaneously, graphic family trees were devised and developed, with sophisticated illustration and layout. In late medieval England they often took the form of long parchment rolls, ideal for expressing descent through time. Bernard Gui’s Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French is analysed in detail.

Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

In the Middle Ages, ‘chivalry’ was a collective noun referring to mounted and fully armed knights and squires. But in modern English, we use the term for the wider martial and courtly culture of those people, and in particular for the ideals of knighthood which are now associated principally with a romantic vision of elegant and civilised masculinity. Yet these assumptions about knightly ideals are based upon a partial reading of the surviving medieval sources, downplaying the overriding importance of more martial qualities like prowess, courage and the competition for honour, and more importantly constant debate about the norms of medieval aristocratic masculinity

This chapter explores the relationship of Chaucer and his literary work to the wider chivalric culture in which he lived. It discusses the developments over the course of the fourteenth century to the status, significance and remit of the gatekeepers of chivalric knowledge, the officers of arms. Heraldry, the language of chivalry, was omnipresent in the late medieval world and encapsulated status, genealogy and affinity. During the fourteenth century it emerged from exclusively aristocratic usage to include widespread adoption by the gentry and the urban patriciate. Chaucer was himself armigerous and operated at the practical fringes of chivalric culture through work such as overseeing the erection of scaffolds for the Smithfield tournaments of 1390, providing witness testimony in the Court of Chivalry in 1386, and through his wider social life with prominent officers of arms such as his father-in-law, Guyenne King of Arms.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.