European history: medieval period, middle ages Books

The Akhbār majmū'a, or 'Collected Accounts', deal with the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 and subsequent events in al-Andalus, down to and including the reign of 'Abd al-Rahmān III (912-961), founder of the Umayyad caliphate of...

Metaphysics and Hermeneutics in the Medieval Platonic Tradition consists of twelve essays originally published between 2006 and 2015, dealing with main trends and specific figures within the medieval Platonic tradition. Three essays provide general...

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written by a missionary priest in the early thirteenth century to record the history of the crusades to Livonia and Estonia around 1186-1227, offers one of the most vivid examples of the early thirteenth century...

Bede (c. 673-735) was Anglo-Saxon England's most prominent scholar, and his body of work is among the most important intellectual achievements of the entire Middle Ages. Bede and the Future brings together an international group of Bede scholars to...

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families-one knightly and one mercantile-with a detailed...

Niketas Choniates was in Constantinople when it was burnt and looted by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade and he wrote a history which has always been the mainstay for anyone wishing to learn about the Comnene dynasty and the Byzantine Empire of the...

King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across the late medieval and early modern periods, their cultural influence extending from Robin Hood ballads to Shakespearean national histories. This study represents the first detailed exploration of this...

The early modern Mediterranean was an area where many different rich cultural traditions came in contact with each other, and were often forced to co-exist, frequently learning to reap the benefits of co-operation. Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Muslims,...

Scholarship on premodern Japan has grown spectacularly over the past four decades, in terms of both sophistication and volume. A new approach has developed, marked by a higher reliance on primary documents, a shift away from the history of elites to...

Medieval Greece brings together twelve articles by historian Michael Heslop, showcasing his long-standing interest in the medieval castles of Greece.Ten of the articles in this volume focus on the Dodecanese islands, mainly Rhodes, at the time of their...

Fully illustrated with over fifty photographs, this book describes the ancient fighting styles and mythical self-images of Germanic warriors from 200 BC - AD 1000 and presents vivid and fascinating survey that adds a colourful new dimension to our...

In one of his sermons, the medieval preacher Bernardino of Siena listed seven 'fathers' to whom one owed obedience: God, one's natural father, godfather, confessor, benefactor, a government official, and any elderly man. This book seeks to answer the...

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point...

Research into the emotions is beginning to gain momentum in Anglo-Saxon studies. In order to integrate early medieval Britain into the wider scholarly research into the history of emotions (a major theme in other fields and a key field in...

This volume explores the issues of taking, using and being hostages in the Middle Ages. It brings together recent research in the areas of hostages and hostageships, looking at the act of hostage-taking and the hostages themselves through the...

This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer,...

A study of ancient Rome as a prominent topic in the works of Middle English poets. Discusses how each these poets conceives of ancient Rome and Romans, both pagan and Christian, and why it matters to their work. Includes the works of Gower, Chaucer,...

This project is an attempt to challenge the canonical gender concept while trying to specify what gender was in the medieval and early modern world. Despite the emphasis on individual, identity and difference that past research claims, much of this...

Featured here is a modern translation of a medieval herbal, with a study showing how this technical treatise on herbs was turned into a literary curiosity in the nineteenth century. The contours of this second edition replicate the first; however, it has...

Through close examination of ancient, medieval, and modern Lives of the saints, Ann W. Astell demonstrates how the historical transformation of hagiography as a genre correlates with similar changes in biblical studies.Christian hagiography flourished...

With exacting research and skillful analysis, the Cutlers revise the traditional explanations of the roots of anti-Semitism. They contend that the great outburst of anti-Semitism in Western Europe during the Middle Ages ... derived from primarily...

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the landscapes of the Middle Ages within and beyond Europe, paying close attention to the relationship between 'real' and imagined landscapes and the ways that medieval people made and inhabited their world...

St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373, canonized 1391) was one of the most charismatic and influential female visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Altogether, she received some 700 revelations, dealing with subjects ranging from meditations on the human...

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe investigates the medieval understanding of sacred place, arguing for the centrality of bodies and bodily metaphors to the establishment, function, use, and power of medieval churches.

This book examines the contribution of women to the Humiliati movement, providing original archival evidence indicating that women dominated the group's membership. These findings have implications for both women's spirituality and women's work,...

While a culture may have a dominant way of "mapping," its geography is always plural, and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces the map's early development into an emblem of the state,...

Charting the expansion of the Rum Seljuqs from rulers of a small principality to a fully- fledged sultanate ruling over almost the whole of Anatolia, this book demonstrates how ideology, rather than military success, was crucial in this development.The...

The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history...

The first thorough examination of all aspects of physical impairment and disability in medieval Europe. Studying key areas and the modern day implications of medieval concepts, this is a crucial study of a largely ignored subject in medieval history.

Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present...

The region called Livonia (corresponding to modern Estonia and Latvia) emerged out of the rapid transformation caused by the conquest, Christianisation and colonisation on the north-east shore of the Baltic Sea in the late twelfth and the early...

In this engaging book Matthew Johnson looks 'behind the castle gate' to discover the truth about castles in England at the end of the Middle Ages.Traditional studies have seen castles as compromises between the needs of comfort and of defence, and as...

Dr Jennifer Welsh received her M.A. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University in 2000, and her M.A. and PhD in History from Duke University in 2004 and 2009. Her dissertation dealt with the cult of St. Anne in late medieval and early modern Europe...

Inquiring into childhood is one of the most appropriate ways to address the perennial and essential question of what it is that makes human beings - each of us - human. In Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds,...

Bringing together distinguished scholars in honor of Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, this volume presents original and innovative research on the critical and uneasy relationship between authority and spectacle in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth...

The pontificate of Innocent II (1130-1143) has long been recognized as a watershed in the history of the papacy, marking the transition from the age of reform to the so-called papal monarchy, when an earlier generation of idealistic reformers gave way to...

Scholars have long been interested in the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon past can be understood using material written, and produced, in the twelfth century; and simultaneously in the continued importance (or otherwise) of the Anglo-Saxon past in the...