How did medieval people define themselves? And how did they balance their identities as individuals with the demands of their communities? Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages intertwines the study of identities with current scholarship to reveal their multi-layered, sometimes contradictory dimensions. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from legal texts to hagiographies and biblical exegesis, and diverse cultural and social approaches, this volume enriches our understanding of medieval people's identities - as defined by themselves and by others, as individuals and as members of groups and communities. It adopts a complex and wide-ranging understanding of what constituted 'identities' beyond family and regional or national belonging, such as social status, gender, age, literacy levels, and displacement. New figures and new concepts of 'identities' thus emerge from the dialogue between the chapters, through an approach based on life-histories, lived experience, ethnogenesis, theories of diaspora, cultural memory and generational change.

'In this volume a galaxy of leading historians illuminates a wide range of topics and themes. Our understanding of post-Conquest England, Normandy, Flanders, medieval memory and historiography, ideas of gender and the study of the bible is enriched through analysis of charters, chronicles, legal treatises, glosses, hagiography and vernacular texts. Yet the chapters have a unity, fanning out as they do from the oeuvre of the beneficently influential historian whom the volume honours.' David D'Avray, University College London

Julie Barrau is Senior Lecturer in Medieval British History at the University of Cambridge. She has published research on Thomas Becket and his circle, letter-writing, Latin literacy, and on the circulation of knowledge in the central Middle Ages. Her first book, Bible, lettres et politique. L'Écriture au service des hommes à l'époque de Thomas Becket, was awarded the Prix Saintour by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. David Bates is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. He gave the Ford Lectures in the University of Oxford in 2010 and has a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Caen-Normandie. His most recent books are The Normans and Empire (2013), William the Conqueror (2016; French translation, 2018), and (with Xavier Barral i Altet), La Tapisserie de Bayeux (2019), awarded the Prix du Livre d'Art by the Syndicat National des Antiquaires.