European history: medieval period, middle ages Books

Dante and the Blessed Virgin is distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny's eloquent reading of one of western literature's most famous works by a Catholic writer. The book provides Catholic readers new to Dante's The Divine Comedy (or Commedia) with a...

The Borgarthing Law and the Eidsivathing Law is dedicated to two closely linked medieval laws which were intended to cover adjacent legal provinces in eastern Norway, around and beyond the modern capital, Oslo.The core of this book consists of new...

Writing the Military History of Pre-Crusade Europe brings together fourteen articles by eminent historians David S. Bachrach and Bernard S. Bachrach. Crucial to the writing of medieval military history is a thorough understanding of the strengths...

First published in 1939, this is a reissue of Henri Pirenne's extremely popular and influential history of Europe in the Middle Ages. It begins with the Barbarian and Musulman invasions in the fifth century AD, which signalled...

This book provides a broad history of the Seljuq Turks from their origins and early conquests in the 10th century, through the rise of empire, until its dissolution at the end of the 12th. Where the history of the Seljuqs is usually studied in the...

The Southern Tang was one of China's minor dynasties and one of the great states in China in the tenth century. Although often regarded as one of several states preceding the much better known Song dynasty (960-1279), the Southern Tang dynasty was in...

A collection of essays focusing on the relationship between concepts of the holy and the unholy in western European medieval culture. Demonstrates how religion, magic, and science were all modes of engagement with a natural world that was understood to...

Now in its fifth edition, this hugely successful text remains as vivid and readable as ever. Frank Barlow illuminates every aspect of the Anglo-Norman world, but the central appeal of the book continues to be its firm narrative structure. Here is a...

From the divine right of kings to the political philosophies of writers such as Machiavelli, the medieval city-states to the unification of Spain, Daniel Waley and Peter Denley focus on the growing power of the state to illuminate changing political...

Mobile Saints examines the central medieval (ca. 950-1150 CE) practice of removing saints' relics from rural monasteries in order to take them on out-and-back journeys, particularly within northern France and the Low Countries. Though the permanent...

The Gulathing Law regulates relations between the social classes, the king and his officers, the clergy, and the peasantry. Parts of the law appear to be a social contract between two parties: on the one hand the people, on the other hand the church and...

This is a book that explores the nature of sainthood in a region at the margins of medieval Latin Christendom. Defining the model of sanctity that characterized Transylvania between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the study considers how the...

The tumultuous relations between Britain and the United Provinces in the seventeenth century provide the backdrop to this book, striking new ground as its transnational framework permits an overview of their intertwined culture, politics, trade,...

Waiting for the End of the World? addresses the archaeological, architectural, historical and geological evidence for natural disasters in the Middle Ages between the 11th and 16th centuries. This volume adopts a fresh interdisciplinary approach to...

Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the...

This book interrogates our ideas about heterosexuality through examination of medieval romance narratives. Familiar configurations of romantic fiction such as male desire overwhelming feminine reluctance and the aloof masculine hero undone by love derive...

This collection of essays focuses attention on how medieval gender intersects with other categories of difference, particularly religion and ethnicity. It treats the period c.800-1500, with a particular focus on the era of the Gregorian reform movement,...

An assessment of the role of the Middle Ages in national historiography and in modern conceptions of national identity, this book looks at relatively young nations, and regions which claim national traditions but were slow to achieve, or regain, separate...

Most modern accounts of fifteenth-century English queens understandably focus on separating what really happened from what was fabricated. What has not been considered in any detail, however, is the fabrications themselves as narratives, and as...

In late medieval Marseille, large segments of society showed up in court - fishmongers, sailors, widows, maids, petty lenders, Jews, and Christians - where they argued, cursed, charged, and counter-charged. In the process, they pushed aside Roman and...

Market Power explores society and economy in medieval Iberia, examining the intersection of regional commercial interests, lordship, and royal authority as part of the evolution of a small village into a rural market town. This analysis of notarial...

Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance is a path-breaking study of a timeless masterpiece. Based on new readings of Cicero's late works, De legibus, De re publica, and De officiis, Michaela Paasche Grudin and Robert Grudin show that...

The arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia forms an indispensable part of modern Turkish discourse on national identity, but Western scholars, by contrast, have rarely included the Anatolian Turks in their discussions about the formation of European...

The papers in this volume investigate the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: Christianity and Islam. Despite their historical significance, those two movements of conversion have never been systematically compared to each...

This book presents an edition of the Questiones super libro 'De Animalibus' Aristotelis, a work by one of the greatest philosophers and physicians of the 13th century, Peter of Spain. Preceding the critical edition, Navarro offers an introduction to...

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved...

Guta Lag, the law of the independent island of Gotland, is one of the earliest laws of Scandinavia. The historical appendix to the law, Guta Saga, was written in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Together, Guta Lag and its accompanying Saga provide...

This volume examines the life of Anne of Bohemia, the first queen of Richard II (1377-1399), and situates her within the context of medieval queenship by arguing that Anne ably fulfilled the political role of the queen consort through her...

This book is the first full-length biography of Joan of Navarre, a fascinating royal woman who became duchess of Brittany and queen consort of England through her two marriages in 1386 and 1403 respectively.Joan was enmeshed in the turbulent politics of...

A Descriptive List Of The Printed Maps Of Somersetshire, 1575-1914 is a historical reference book written by Thomas Chubb and originally published in 1914. The book is a comprehensive guide to the printed maps of Somersetshire, a county in the southwest...

Interdisciplinary in approach, Tolkien the Medievalist provides a fresh perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien's Medievalism. In fifteen essays, eminent scholars and new voices explore how Professor Tolkien responded to a modern age of crisis - historical,...

This volume brings together environmental and human perspectives, engages with both historians and scientists, and, being mindful that environments and disease recognize no boundaries, includes studies that touch on Europe, the wider Mediterranean world,...

Writing Normandy brings together eighteen articles by historian Felice Lifshitz, some of which are published here for the first time. The articles examine the various ways in which local and regional narratives about the past were created and revised in...

The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and...

Incorporating research previously unavailable in English, this clear guide gives a synthesis of the latest scholarship providing the historical and intellectual context for political ideas. This accessible and lucid guide to medieval political thought *...

What was a "garden" in medieval and early modern British culture and how was it imagined? How did it change as Europe opened up to the wider world from the 16th century onwards? In a series of fresh approaches to these questions, the contributors offer...