Department of History
Dr. Richard E. Barton
Contact
Information
Email: rebarton@uncg.edu
Office: MHRA 2115
Office Phone: 336-334-3998
Education
Ph.D., University of
California, Santa Barbara, 1997
M.A., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 1990
B.A., Williams College, 1988
Teaching Experience
Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2004-
Assistant Professor,
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1998-2004
Lecturer, Yale University, 1997-98
Part-Time Lecturer, University of California at Santa Barbara,
1996-97
Research Interests
My research program investigates the structures and nature of power in the aristocratic society of western France between c.900 and c.1200. For medieval aristocrats, power may have seemed a relatively uncomplicated concept: it was literally the ability to dominate lesser men and women. Yet my work broadens the concepts of power, domination, and lordship to include interpersonal dynamics, gender constraints, emotional display and convention, collectively held beliefs and identities, and affective notions of right. What this means, of course, is that I combine in my conception of medieval aristocratic power two notions: a practical understanding of power as the ability to constrain and a more theoretical understanding of power as the confluence of intangible qualities of affect, honor, and/or Acharisma.”
My research is focused on Western France - including Maine, Anjou, the Touraine, the Vendômois, western Brittany, and Southern Normandy - between c.900-1200 (I have also done some work on the early history of Norman England, but this is not a true research specialty). I make use of chronicles, letters, saints’ lives, and early chansons de geste, but most of my work involves the analysis of charters (or diplomas, “acta,” or “notices”). These brief quasi-legal documents were normally drawn up by the monastic recipient of an aristocratic gift of property as a means of keeping straight the monastery=s land-holdings; they exist in the thousands in archives all over the west of France.
Current Projects
- “Henry I, Helias of Maine and the Battle of Tinchebray.” Article accepted for publication
in a festschrift honoring C. Warren Hollister. The volume is being edited by Donald Fleming and Robert Babock, and will be published by Boydell in 2005 or 2006.
- “Blurring the Boundaries of Epic and History: the Canons of Saint-Pierre-de-la-Cour and
the Strange Case of Count David.” Article submitted to Speculum.
- “Courts, Communities and Consensus: Procedure and Adjudication in Western French
Curiae, 950-1150.” Article in preparation.
- “Making a Clamor to the Lord: Some Observations on the Legal and Rhetorical Use of
Clamor in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Western France.”
Article in preparation.
- “Geoffrey of Mayenne or Geoffrey of Acerra? A Manceau Aristocrat’s Adventures in
Southern Italy, c.1080-1130”
Article in preparation.
- Emotion and Power: Aristocratic Attitudes towards Love, Anger, Honor and Shame in
Western France, c.950-1200. Book manuscript in preparation.
Courses Taught
Courses in Preparation
-
Crusading and the Crusades - a 300-level course. Will examine the events of the crusades
between 1050 and 1300 as well as the juxtaposition of Christian and Muslim cultures in the Middle East and elsewhere.
- The Viking Age - a 300-level (or perhaps an incarnation of HIS 542) covering Viking
expansion into the North Atlantic and the cultures established in Scandinavia, the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and Vinland between 800 and 1200
- Violence in the Middle Ages - will be taught as an incarnation of either HIS 542 or HIS
709. Attempts to understand medieval attitudes towards violence, including motivations for acting violently and methods for restraining violence.
Recent Publications
- Richard E. Barton, Lordship in the County of Maine, c.890-1160 (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2004).
- Barton, “Gendering Anger: Ira, Furor and Discourses of Power and Masculinity in the
11th and 12th Centuries,” in In the Garden of Evil: the Vices in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming in 2005).
- Barton, “Writing Warfare, Lordship and History: the Gesta Consulum Andegavorum’s
Account of the Battle of Alençon,” Anglo-Norman Studies 28 (2005), forthcoming.
- Barton, “Preface,” in The Normans and Their Adversaries at War: Essays in Honor of
C. Warren Hollister, ed. Bernard Bachrach and Richard Abels (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2001), 5-13.
- Barton, A'Zealous Anger' and the Renegotiation of Aristocratic Relationships in
Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France," in Anger’s Past: the Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 153-170.