European history: medieval period, middle ages Books

As the story of the war between the sons of Oedipus and their cursed race, the Theban legend rivaled that of Troy in popularity and importance for medieval poets and audiences. Dominique Battles explores the vernacular Theban narratives of the Middle...

In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period...

This volume fluctuates between conceptualizations of movement; either movements that buildings in the medieval Mediterranean facilitated, or the movements of the users and audiences of architecture.From medieval Anatolia to Southern France and the...

In early modern Europe, discernment emerged as a key notion at the intersection of various domains in both learned and artisanal cultures. Often used synonymously with judgment, ingenuity, and taste, discernment defined the ability to perceive and...

This book, first in a series of three, examines the social elites in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, and which social, political, and cultural resources went into their creation. The elite controlled enormous economic resources and exercised power...

Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the...

The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages-the female body-exists in special...

This volume provides a unique primary source on the history and philosophy of mathematics and the exact sciences in the mediaeval Arab world. The second of five comprehensive volumes, this book offers a detailed exploration of Arabic mathematics in the...

In this unique insight into the history and philosophy of mathematics and science in the mediaeval Arab world, the eminent scholar Roshdi Rashed illuminates the various historical, textual and epistemic threads that underpinned the history of Arabic...

The Tarikhnamah is a history of the world and the oldest surviving work of Persian prose. This book examines it as a political and cultural document and why it became such an influential work in the Islamic world.

Bringing together the work of both leading and emerging scholars in the field of medieval gender studies, the essays in Rivalrous Masculinities advance our understanding of medieval masculinity as a pluralized category and as an intersectional category...

Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343–ca. 1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif, is the earliest woman writer of English we know about. Although she described herself as “a simple creature unlettered,”...

A collection of papers in English by one of the foremost historians of the social and economic structure of medieval rural communities, who here examines local societies in rural northern Spain and Portugal in the early middle ages. Principal themes are...

The history of the African and Middle Eastern world is, to a large extent, the story of a religion-Islam-and how it claimed millions of followers across empires and kingdoms. First proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, Islam quickly...

Translating a collection of the most important descriptions of the Turks found in medieval Arabic texts into English, this book aims at delineating the coming of the Turkic people in the eleventh century, their military successes in Iran and Iraq, and...

This book is a collection of papers on the origins of economic thought discovered in the writings of some prominent Islamic scholars, during the five centuries prior to the Latin Scholastics, who include St. Thomas Aquinas. This period of time was...

An account of the re-emergence of Persia as a world player and the reassertion of its cultural, political and spiritual links with Turkic Lands, this book opposes the way in which, for too long, the whole period of Mongol domination of Iran has been...

Of the great philosophers of pagan antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero is the only one whose ideas were continuously accessible to the Christian West following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yet, in marked contrast with other ancient philosophers, Cicero...

In this detailed study of 13th century Catalonia, Caputo examines conceptions of history and messianic redemption in the writings of the Catalonian rabbi and brilliant Talmudic scholar Nahmanides (1195-1270).

Correcting the omissions of traditional history, this is "a reliable survey of the real and varied roles played by women in the medieval period. . . . Highly recommended."-- "Choice" "Many a quaint and amusing side, as well as a wealth of solid...

To understand modern science, it is essential to recognize that many of the most fundamental scientific principles are drawn from the knowledge of ancient civilizations. Taking a global yet comprehensive approach to this complex topic, A History of...

Agnes of Harcourt is an important though little-known 13th-century author. Born into a leading Norman noble family, she became an abbess at the new royal Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, founded just outside of Paris by Isabelle of France, sister of Louis...

This work examines the stages by which religious dissidents were persecuted by Tudor monarchs across the 16th century, and the means by which these dissidents counteracted authorities. During each stage of persecution, many dissidents were able to elude...

In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons explores a widespread ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in the aftermath of the plague in late medieval England. She identifies poverty as a central preoccupation in texts ranging from Piers...

Although Charlemagne held a strong position in defining France's national identity for more than ten centuries, he was swiftly rejected as a national hero from the 1870s onwards for being too German and has never really regained his rightful place in...

In Salvation and Sin, David Aers continues his study of Christian theology in the later Middle Ages. Working at the nexus of theology and literature, he combines formidable theological learning with finely detailed and insightful close readings to...

The new paperback edition of this brilliant and compelling portrait of the Anglo-Scandinavian world is appropriate supplementary reading for 2nd/3rd year undergraduate courses in Medieval British History and the Norman Conquest. Frank Barlow charts the...

During the middle ages, belief in God was the single more important principle for every person, and the all-powerful church was the most important institution. It is impossible to understand the medieval world without understanding the religious vision...

Using a comparative and broad perspective, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 800-1066 draws on archaeology, art history, material culture, texts from charms to chronicles, from royal law-codes to sermons to poems, and other evidence to...

Originally published between 1920 and 1970,The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of...

Using one man as a lens, a man known variously as Folquet, Folques, Folco, and Folc, it will examine some of the important changes and developments of the period from a new, more human, perspective.

Warfare in Medieval Europe, now in its second edition, offers considerably more attention to the transition from the later Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages, the composition of the armies of the opponents of the West, and the experience of commanders...

This book offers a new appraisal of the ancestry and career of Godfrey of Bouillon (c.1060-1100), a leading participant in the First Crusade (1096-99), and the first ruler of Latin Jerusalem (1099-1100), the polity established by the crusaders after they...

A Monk's Confession is the first completely new English translation of Guibert of Nogent's remarkable memoirs in over seventy years. Written around the year 1115, they offer an unparalleled look at the life of a monk in the Middle Ages. Guibert, who...

Power often operates in strange and surprising ways. With A Convent Tale, Renee Baernstein uncovers some of the nuanced methods cloistered women devised to exert their agency. In the tradition of Simon Schama and Steven Ozment, Baernstein uses the...

Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the...

In the past few decades there has been an explosion of interest in the period of late antiquity. Rather than being viewed within a paradigm of the fall of the Roman Empire, these centuries have come to be seen as a time of immense creativity and...

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader medieval Europe that modern historians write about? This collection brings the focus back...

Published in 1997, this is a translation of the Intnerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, 'The Itenerary of the Pilgrims and the deeds of King Richard,' based on the edition produced in 1864 by William Stubbs as volume 1 of his chronicles and...

Vitality and change marked twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval Mediterranean society. Many sought to capitalize upon resurgences in economic success, political intrigue, and social cohesion. Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213)...

This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the "paternal dungheaps" of words, and tracing their origins not...

This book explores how the cultural distinctions and conflicts between Anglo-Saxons and Normans originating with the Norman Conquest of 1066 prevailed well into the fourteenth century and are manifest in a significant number of Middle English romances...

Divorce in Medieval England is intended to reorient scholarly perceptions concerning divorce in the medieval period. Divorce, as we think of it today, is usually considered to be a modern invention. This book challenges that viewpoint, documenting the...