Uncertain Refuge Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England

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Sanctuary has typically been depicted as the source of a power struggle between church and
state, with the church trying to challenge royal authority for ultimate control over the kingdom's
subjects. What is new about Elizabeth Allen's study of sanctuary is that she sees it instead as a boon to bothchurch and state...With her astute analysis and attention to unconventional sources, Allen makes a significant contribution to the study of sanctuary, a field more typically populated by dry legal records and their historians. Nonetheless, this study is the first to clarify just how integral sanctuary was to royal authority.

" (Journal of British Studies) "Uncertain Refuge couldn't be timelier. The arrival at the United States border of migrants from Mexico, Central America, South America, and elsewhere and African and Middle Eastern asylum seekers' journeys on land to Turkey, as well as the perilous attempts to traverse the Mediterranean to Europe, evince how the search for sanctuary is now, more than ever, a global concern. The question of how sanctuary functioned in the past has enjoyed renewed attention of late...Spanning the twelfth to seventeenth centuries in its examination of an array of texts including Latin chronicles, vernacular poetry, and Tudor drama, Uncertain Refuge is required reading for anyone interested in not only sanctuary, but also law, cultural geography, kingship, religion, and literature in medieval England." (Speculum) "A splendid, exemplary, important book. Its erudition puts it on the same level as some of the field-transcending, encyclopedic work of medievalists of past generations. But its sense of the stakes of its argument, particularly its extended engagement with the urgency of sanctuary and care for the marginalized, make it a crucial book for this moment." (D. Vance Smith, Princeton University) "Elizabeth Allen's Uncertain Refuge is an important, indeed necessary, intervention in the scholarly conversation about medieval concepts of sanctuary and the power they continue to hold today. By considering its cultural meaning and power, Allen brings a substantially different perspective to sanctuary in medieval England than others, greatly deepening our understanding of its significance." (Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia University)