The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium, opening these fields for further research. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. This Handbook contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and will not only serve as the major reference text in the area of medieval and gender studies, but will also provide the agenda for future new research.

The brilliant and provocative new book from one of the world’s foremost political writers.

In The War on the West, international bestselling author Douglas Murray asks: if the history of humankind is one of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it?

It’s become perfectly acceptable to celebrate the contributions of non-Western cultures, but discussing their flaws and crimes is called hate speech. What’s more it has become acceptable to discuss the flaws and crimes of Western culture, but celebrating their contributions is also called hate speech. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning; however, some is part of a larger international attack on reason, democracy, science, progress and the citizens of the West by dishonest scholars, hatemongers, hostile nations and human-rights abusers hoping to distract from their ongoing villainy.

In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows the ways in which many well-meaning people have been lured into polarisation by lies, and shows how far the world’s most crucial political debates have been hijacked across Europe and America. Propelled by an incisive deconstruction of inconsistent arguments and hypocritical activism, The War on the West is an essential and urgent polemic that cements Murray’s status as one of the world’s foremost political writers.

Since the early 20th century the scholarly study of Anglo-Saxon texts has been augmented by systematic excavation and analysis of physical evidence - settlements, cemeteries, artefacts, environmental data, and standing buildings. This evidence has confirmed some readings of the Anglo-Saxon literary and documentary sources and challenged others. More recently, large-scale excavations both in towns and in the countryside, the application of computer methods to large bodies of data, new techniques for site identification such as remote sensing, and new dating methods have put archaeology at the forefront of Anglo-Saxon studies. The Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, written by a team of experts and presenting the results of the most up-to-date research, will both stimulate and support further investigation into those aspects of Anglo-Saxon life and culture which archaeology has fundamentally illuminated. It will prove an essential resourse for our understanding of a society poised at the interface between prehistory and history.

Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to reconsider China's relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China's tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants. This interdisciplinary and multi-perspective study will appeal to readers of comparative and world history, especially those interested in medieval warfare, diplomacy, and cultural studies.

Fourteenth-century Japan witnessed a fundamental political and intellectual conflict about the nature of power and society, a conflict that was expressed through the rituals and institutions of two rival courts. Rather than understanding the collapse of Japan's first warrior government (the Kamakura bakufu) and the onset of a chaotic period of civil war as the manipulation of rival courts by powerful warrior factions, this study argues that the crucial ideological and intellectual conflict of the fourteenth century was between the conservative forces of ritual precedent and the ritual determinists steeped in Shingon Buddhism. Members of the monastic nobility who came to dominate the court used the language of Buddhist ritual, including incantations (mantras), gestures (mudras), and "cosmograms" (mandalas projected onto the geography of Japan) to uphold their bids for power. Sacred places that were ritual centers became the targets of military capture precisely because they were ritual centers. Ritual was not simply symbolic; rather, ritual became the orchestration, or actual dynamic, of power in itself. This study undermines the conventional wisdom that Zen ideals linked to the samurai were responsible for the manner in which power was conceptualized in medieval Japan, and instead argues that Shingon ritual specialists prolonged the conflict and enforced the new notion that loyal service trumped the merit of those who simply requested compensation for their acts. Ultimately, Shingon mimetic ideals enhanced warrior power and enabled Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, rather than the reigning emperor, to assert sovereign authority in Japan.

Protestant reformers sought to effect a radical change in the way their contemporaries understood and coped with the suffering of body and soul that were so prominent in the early modern period. The reformers did so because they believed that many traditional approaches to suffering were not sufficiently Christian-that is, they thought these approaches were unbiblical. The Reformation of Suffering examines the Protestant reformation of suffering and shows how it was a central part of the larger Protestant effort to reform church and society. Despite its importance, no other text has directly examined this reformation of suffering. This book investigates the history of Christian reflection on suffering and consolation in the Latin West and places the Protestant reformation campaign within this larger context, paying close attention to important continuities and discontinuities between Catholic and Protestant traditions. Focusing especially on Wittenberg Christianity, The Reformation of Suffering examines the genesis of Protestant doctrines of suffering among the leading reformers and then traces the transmission of these doctrines from the reformers to the common clergy. It also examines the reception of these ideas by lay people. The text underscores the importance of consolation in early modern Protestantism and seeks to challenge a scholarly trend that has emphasized the themes of discipline and control in Wittenberg Christianity. It shows how Protestant clergymen and burghers could be remarkably creative and resourceful as they sought to convey solace to one another in the midst of suffering and misfortune. The Protestant reformation of suffering had a profound impact on church and society in the early modern period and contributed significantly to the shape of the modern world.