ABSTRACT The collective intoning of chant and prayer performed on a saint’s feast day tells us much about what the composers, compilers, and celebrants of that liturgy understood and valued about that saint in their community. Liturgies composed specifically in honour of a particular saint thus understandably dominate the scholarship. This article instead spotlights the Commune sanctorum, those materials able to be used for the liturgy of any saint in a given saintly category. I show how Commune sanctorum materials, especially in the León Antiphoner, could do far more than simply ascribe a saint standard, saintly characteristics. Rather, they could offer liturgical practitioners the opportunity to create personalised liturgies with meaningful resonance to the saint’s life. Through two case studies, this article challenges our understanding of common and proper saints’ liturgies, situating liturgies created from the Commune sanctorum as sites of distinctive local practice and liturgical creativity.

ABSTRACT Rodney Hilton’s observations about women’s work recorded in manorial accounts underpin Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden’s influential argument that paid work for women expanded significantly after the Black Death. This article assesses the value of English manorial accounts for documenting women’s work. We analyse 1191 manorial accounts from c. 1250-c. 1450 and find that 73 per cent recorded no clear evidence of workers’ gender. Even those that record details about some workers, often also record large groups of unidentified workers undertaking key tasks such as harvest work. These are the ‘known unknowns’ of the article’s title: they make it impossible to quantify change over time. However, manorial accounts do provide evidence that women were an important part of the agricultural labour force on some manors both before and after the Black Death, undertaking a wide range of tasks and sometimes receiving wages that were higher than men’s.

ABSTRACT The civic clerk was a key figure within medieval urban government. However, due to the scarcity of early civic records, the identity, titles, and functions of York’s early civic clerks remain insufficiently understood. This article addresses these issues through an extensive examination of external sources. The findings show that by the late thirteenth century, numerous clerks were active in York’s city court, though they should not be identified as civic clerks. Early civic clerks were referred to as clerici civitatis, and it was not until the 1370s – amid shifts in the city’s political landscape – that the title clericus communis began to appear. In the early fourteenth century, civic clerks played a prominent role in external affairs, including parliamentary representation and financial administration.

ABSTRACT This article examines the posthumous travels and textual traditions surrounding the seventh-century Mercian saint Wærburh. Through close reading of sources such as the Kentish Royal Legend, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin's Vita sanctae Werburgae uirginis, Liber Eliensis and Life of St Werbuge by Henry Bradshaw, this study reveals how different religious communities manipulated translatio narratives to serve their political, cultural, and spiritual agendas. The analysis considers the priorities for the medieval communities at Hanbury, Ely, Worcester, and Chester, and how these impacted the narratives that each developed around the saint. The study illustrates how medieval hagiographers appropriated established translation topoi to promote local identities, conceal dubious provenance, and compete for the spiritual and economic benefits that relics provided to religious foundations.

ABSTRACT This contribution assesses the content and contribution of Gabrielle Spiegel's 1975 article on ‘The Cult of Saint Denis and Capetian Kingship’, Journal of Medieval History 1 (1975): 43-69, placing her arguments within a tradition of writing on both this saint and these kings that went back to the ninth century. This article is part of a Special Issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Medieval History.

ABSTRACT The Journal of Medieval History set out to become an all-embracing and unspecialised venue for works on European history ‘between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance’. However, during the first two decades of its existence, the journal published remarkably few articles on Jewish topics, with but a handful of essays, mostly on the issue of religious polemics. It was only in the late 1990s that essays speaking to Jewish experiences and involving Jewish sources began regularly to appear. This shift also brought about a wealth of contributions in subfields of Jewish Studies – law, liturgy, literature and visual arts – that until then had not found a place in the journal. This Comment is part of a Special Issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Medieval History.

ABSTRACT This article explores the exceptional Liber Sermonum composed by Martin of León around 1200. First, it describes the work in its manuscript form, illuminating the historical context of its production. Then, the article maps the occurrence of motifs pertinent to crusading throughout the Liber. This data unveils Martin’s expertise and, thus, involvement in several crusade arenas, straddling action against scholastics, Jews, heretics and ‘pagans’ (that is, Muslims). Lastly, three texts of the Liber are analysed in-depth: A Palm Sunday sermon evidences Martin’s involvement in depth the Third Crusade and anti-heretical action; a treatise on the Acts of the Apostles shows how he tried to promote popular preaching in León; and a treatise on rogation liturgy elucidates how a providential logic entangled various crusade arenas despite their geographical distance. The methodological tools developed for identifying ‘the crusade’ in these texts demonstrate the pertinence of liturgical sermons for studying the crusade movement.