The unlikely king who saved England.

Down swept the Vikings from the frigid North. Across the English coastlands and countryside they raided, torched, murdered, and destroyed all in their path. Farmers, monks, and soldiers all fell bloody under the Viking sword, hammer, and axe.

Then, when the hour was most desperate, came an unlikely hero. King Alfred rallied the battered and bedraggled kingdoms of Britain and after decades of plotting, praying, and persisting, finally triumphed over the invaders.

Alfred's victory reverberates to this day: He sparked a literary renaissance, restructured Britain's roadways, revised the legal codes, and revived Christian learning and worship. It was Alfred's accomplishments that laid the groundwork for Britian's later glories and triumphs in literature, liturgy, and liberty.

"Ben Merkle tells the sort of mythic adventure story that stirs the imagination and races the heart―and all the more so knowing that it is altogether true " ―George Grant, author of "The Last Crusader" and" The Blood of the Moon"

Following the interest in recent years in Celtic spirituality, Paul Cavill's book looks at the impact of Christianity on the pagan Germanic peoples who invaded Britain from the 5th century onwards. Drawing on historical and archeological evidence, he paints a vivid picture of Anglo-Saxon culture and belief, contrasting this with the Celtic world view, and explaining how the powerful warrior code of the Anglo-Saxon peoples became merged with new Christian values. Quotes from Anglo-Saxon literature include the epic "Beowulf", and "The Dream of the Rood" along with Caedmon's "Hymn to Creation", a translation of Psalm 136 and numerous miracle stories.

The Paston family of Norfolk, England, has long been known to medieval scholars for its large collection of personal correspondence, which has survived five centuries. Until now, however, they have remained virtually unknown to the general reading public. Revealing a wealth of information about the manners, morals, lifestyles, and attitudes of the late Middle Ages, the letters also tell a story of three generations of the fifteenth-century Paston family that reads like a historical novel full of memorable characters:

• Margaret Paston, the indomitable wife and mother who fought the family's battles;

• her husband, John Paston I, tough, hardheaded, and thrice confined to Fleet Prison but never yielding to his enemies;

• daughter Margery, who scandalized family and friends by falling in love with the Paston bailiff, Richard Calle;

• lighthearted, chivalric Sir John; and

• cheerful, sensible John Ill, who against all odds succeeded in marrying for love.

A Medieval Family traces the family history from 1420, through the stormy Wars of the Roses, to the early 1500s. The family's story, extracted from their letters and papers and told largely in their own words, shows a side of history rarely revealed: the lives and fortunes not of kings and queens but of ordinary people with problems, tragedies, and moments of happiness.

This remarkable book assembles all that is known or can be deduced about the most shadowy period of British history since the Roman occupation and about its legendary hero.

Virgin martyrs make up one of the largest categories of medieval saints. To judge by their frequent appearances in art and literature, they also figure among the most venerated. The legends of virgin martyrs, retold in various ways through the centuries, illuminate trends in popular piety, values, and literary tastes.

Chaste Passions contains eighteen English virgin martyr legends, each of a different saint and each translated in its entirety into colloquial, modern English prose. Faithful in tone and meaning to the originals, Karen A. Winstead's lively translations allow contemporary readers to appreciate why virgin martyr legends thrived for hundreds of years. Winstead presents the tales in chronological order, tracing the effects of the composition and tastes of the audience on the development of the genre.

The virgin martyr, Winstead tells us, escapes the confining female stereotypes -- demure maiden or disruptive shrew -- prevalent in writings of the period. Because nearly all of the texts were written by men but addressed to women, they exhibit a fascinating interplay between male views of so-called women's literature and the demands of their intended audience.

Familiarity with this widely read genre is essential to a full understanding of medieval culture, and Chaste Passions is an excellent introduction to these often racy, sometimes comic, tales.

John Rogers addresses the literary and ideological consequences of the remarkable, if improbable, alliance between science and politics in seventeenth-century England. He looks at the cultural intersections between the English and Scientific Revolutions, concentrating on a body of work created in a brief but potent burst of intellectual activity during the period of the Civil Wars, the Interregnum, and the earliest years of the Stuart Restoration. Rogers traces the broad implications of a seemingly outlandish cultural phenomenon: the intellectual imperative to forge an ontological connection between physical motion and political action. The work of the writers whom Rogers discusses - John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Gerrard Winstanley, William Harvey, and Margaret Cavendish - spans the spectrum of genres from medical treatise to epic poem. Despite their differences, each text participates in or reacts to one of the least understood intellectual movements in early modern England, a short-lived embrace of philosophical idealism that Rogers identifies as the Vitalist Moment. Each writer, he asserts, struggled to reconcile the new materialist science of corpuscular motion and interaction with the new political philosophy of popular sovereignty and consensus.

From 1337 to 1453 England repeatedly invaded France on the pretext that her kings had a right to the French throne. Though it was a small, poor country, England for most of those "hundred years" won the battles, sacked the towns and castles, and dominated the war. The protagonists of the Hundred Years War are among the most colorful in European history: Edward III, the Black Prince; Henry V, who was later immortalized by Shakespeare; the splendid but inept John II, who died a prisoner in London; Charles V, who very nearly overcame England; and the enigmatic Charles VII, who at last drove the English out. Desmond Seward's critically-acclaimed account of the Hundred Years War brings to life all of the intrigue, beauty, and royal to-the-death-fighting of that legendary century-long conflict.

This text offers an examination of Welsh military organization, strategy, tactics and conduct in war which goes beyond the military sphere and touches on all aspects of Welsh society in this period. It helps to explain the transformation of the country from a part of post-Roman medieval Europe to the series of independent principalities eventually conquered by Edward I. The author questions many of the traditional assumptions, notably the tendency to see the Welsh (and the Irish and the Scottish) as "barbaric" and provides a corrective to these current views. It demonstrates that, whilst allowing for differences given the nature, economy, geography and topography of the country, Welsh military developments from the end of Roman rule to the Edwardian conquest generally correspond to those seen in the rest of western Europe.

In this sourcebook, the editors bring together a varied selection of medieval documents on pastoral care. These materials - from administrative, theological, legal, historical and literary sources - are grouped thematically and offer a summary of the multifaceted lives of the parish clergymen.

Eric John is one of the most distinguished and provocative of Anglo Saxonists. This new and original analysis is the fruit of thirty years os scholarship and therefore has something of the nature of a testament. Mr John seeks to make use of social anthropological insight to understand the type of people the Anglo-Saxons were and sets them, unusually, in the European context.