Freedom, Slavery, and England’s Medieval Past

This book is a study of how ideas drawn from the English Middle Ages have been used to preserve and withhold freedom in the modern world. Broad in scope, it draws on canonical and ephemeral texts, including chronicles, memoirs, novels, political pamphlets, archival material, and works of history by scholars, colonizers, abolitionists, and Lost Cause apologists. Using three generations of a single family to frame its analysis, it reveals an intellectual genealogy that moves from medieval England to modern Africa, the Caribbean, the plantations of the US, and back again, to the academic disciplines of medieval studies and the very fabric of England’s medieval heritage. It argues that England’s medieval past has been a source of tenacious bonds—of family, freedom, slavery, nation, and race—and suggests that better understanding how those bonds were formed and resisted will enable full analysis of their legacy.