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Courtly Culture and Courtly Style in the Anglo-Norman World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

C. Warren Hollister
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Extract

Two years ago, at an NACBS council meeting at the now defunct Shamrock Hotel in Houston, one of our officers—not me, I hasten to say—suggested that NACBS Presidents really ought to begin earning their keep by delivering presidential addresses. I objected that NACBS Presidents receive no keep, but I was ruled out of order. I therefore stand before you this evening as the first person ever to deliver an NACBS presidential address. This, I can assure you, is a daunting challenge. One provision of the council resolution was that the address should be published as a scholarly essay in Albion, and with Albion's international reputation, this means that what I say here tonight will be read very critically—perhaps even scoffed at—by historians of medieval Britain throughout the world. I dare not be frivolous. On the other hand, we have all just enjoyed a splendid banquet. We have indulged in good wine. Some might now be in the mood for an hour's technical discussion of Anglo-Norman prosopography, but in actuality, I suspect that very, very few of you are in such a mood.

So the great challenge of the presidential address is to be amusing and significant at one and the same time—and I'm not at all certain that I am capable of squaring that circle. I was puzzling over the problem almost exactly one year ago, at our NACBS Annual Meeting last October, at the elegant and, indeed, unsinkable Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.

Type
Presidential Address North American Conference on British Studies 1987
Information
Albion , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1988

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References

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