Bad behaviour in medieval and early modern Europe

Abstract

I am very pleased to have been invited to introduce this selection of lectures given at the recent Bad Behaviour in Medieval and Early Modern Europe post-graduate colloquium organised by the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. My first duty is to congratulate the organisers on their choice of title — what inspired vagueness! It enabled contributors to address ‘a multitude of sins’, as, indeed, the present representative sample of papers delivered at the colloquium amply demonstrates. And the thirteen speakers were equally cosmopolitan — Kent students were well represented, of course, but so were students from other British universities, as well as international researchers from Spain and Italy. We ranged widely chronologically too, from Anglo-Saxon times (Malte Ringer's discussion of anti-social behaviour in three of Wulfstan’s homilies), via the consideration of works by such ‘mainstream’ writers of the European Renaissance as Shakespeare (James Smith) and Tasso (Marianna Orsi), to Joel Swann’s fascinating paper on the frequently scurrilous verse libels of the English seventeenth century — by way of early sixteenth-century Bohemian gun-culture (Christopher Nicholson — within). [Excerpt from Foreword]