Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Karen Bosnos

NAME:
- Karen Bosnos

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2007)

ADVISORS:
- Stephen D. White

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Thomas S. Burns
- Elizabeth Carson Pastan

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Treason and traitors in Norman and Anglo-Norman history, c.1066--1135: Representation, discourse, practice

Abstract: Prior to the English Statute of Treasons (1352), treason in England was neither a simple concept nor a clearly defined legal offense. Surviving Norman and Anglo-Norman historical texts from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries reveal societies seemingly obsessed with disloyalty, beset on all sides by rebels, perjurers, and faithless men. Because histories by authors such as William of Poitiers, Orderic Vitalis, and William of Malmesbury are our best sources for this period, modern historians have tended to accept these authors\\\' references to treason and traitors at face value, without critical examination of the discourses in which medieval writers refer to them. By reading these histories as transparent accounts of real events, modern historians have often exaggerated the degree to which Norman dukes and Anglo-Norman kings consolidated their authority over nobles, overlooked the mechanisms by which these rulers sometimes gained and sometimes lost noble support, and anachronistically misrepresented \\\"treason\\\" as an objectively defined crime against medieval kings or states.

This study corrects these assumptions and demonstrates that denunciations of treason and characterizations of traitors as rash, greedy, ambitious men in Anglo-Norman historical narratives are actually the products of literary strategies that disguise ongoing political conflict between dukes or kings and great nobles by reflexively legitimating the political initiatives of the former and representing the latter\\\'s resistance to them in a pejorative light as \\\"treason.\\\" Through my analysis of representations of traitors, rebellion, and punishments for treason in these texts, I argue that \\\"treason\\\" was not a prohibited legal transgression against a monarch or a centralizing state but an ambiguous and contested category of wrongdoing and an important discursive strategy that aristocratic competitors for political power could deploy and re-deploy for political purposes in eleventh and twelfth-century Normandy and England.

MPACT Scores for Karen Bosnos

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-03-16 12:58:41

Advisors and Advisees Graph

generating graph, please reload

Students under Karen Bosnos

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None