James Howard-Johnston provides a sweeping and highly readable account of probably the most dramatic single episode in world history - the emergence of a new religion (Islam), the destruction of two established great powers (Roman and Iranian), and the creation of a new world empire by the Arabs, all in the space of not much more than a generation (610-52 AD). Warfare looms large, especially where operations can be followed in some detail, as in Iraq 636-40, in Egypt 641-2 and in the long-drawn out battle for the Mediterranean (649-98). As the first history of the formative phase of Islam to be grounded in the important non-Islamic as well as Islamic sources Witnesses to a World Crisis is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand Islam as a religion and political force, the modern Middle East, and the jihadist impulse, which is as evident today as it was in the seventh century.

R.C. Van Caenegem is the successor of Henri Pirenne and of F.L. Ganshof at the University of Ghent. These essays reflect Van Caenegem's main interests over his career: the Common Law in England and Customary Law in the Low Countries; the differences between institutional development in England and in the rest of Europe; and the forces making for autocratic as opposed to representative government. A number of pieces discuss the nature of history itself: how it compares with the sciences and what it can teach us. Two essays commemorate the lives and work of Pirenne and Ganshof.

Discrete inquiries into 15 forms of the Arthurian legends produced over the last century explore how they have altered the tradition. They consider works from the US and Europe, and those aimed at popular and elite audiences. The overall conclusion is that the "Arthurian revival" is an ongoing event, and has become multivalent, multinational, and multimedia. Originally published in 1992.

Paula C. Clarke's detailed account of the careers of two brothers, Tommaso and Niccolo Soderini, and their relationship with the Medici family opens up a new perspective on the political world of Renaissance Florence. The Soderini were at different times supporters and adversaries of the Medici, whose rise to power remains the subject of historical debate. Based on hitherto unpublished sources, particularly from the archives of Florence and Milan, The Soderini and the Medici examines the nature of the ascendancy of the Medici and of the opposition to them, the sources of their power, the operation of their system of patronage, the bonds connecting one of the most successful political elites in Renaissance Italy, and the development of the political institutions of the Florentine state. It is an important contribution to our understanding of the political and constitutional history of Florence.

This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. It traces how and why this narrative was constructed as a philosemitic narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to the rise of political antisemitism. This book also documents why it is a myth for medieval Europe, and illuminates how changes in Jewish history change our understanding of European history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of central topics, such as the usury debate, commercial contracts, and moral literature on money and value to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.

Originally published in 1996, the articles in this book are revised, expanded papers from a session at the 17th International Congress of the Arthurian Society held in 1993. The chapters cover Arthurian studies' directions at the time, showcasing analysis of varied aspects of visual representation and relation to literary themes. Close attention to the historical context is a key feature of this work, investigating the linkage between texts and images in the Middle Ages and beyond.

This revised edition of the classic text of the period provides both the student and the specialist with an informative account of post-Roman English society. After a general survey of the main developments from the fourth century to the eleventh, the book offers analysis of: * social organization * the changing character of kingship, of royal government and the influence of the church * the history of settlement * the making of the landscape * the growth of towns and trade * the consequences of the Norman Conquest. The author also considers the various influences; British, Frankish, Viking and Christian that helped shape English society and contributed to the making of a united kingdom.

The focus of this book is medieval vernacular literature in Western Europe. Chapters are written by experts in the area and present the current scholarship at the time this book was originally published in 1996. Each chapter has a bibliography of important works in that area as well. This is a thorough and reliable guide to trends in research on medieval Arthuriana.

In 987, when Hugh Capet took the throne of France, founding a dynasty which was to rule for over 300 years, his kingdom was weak and insignificant. But by 1100, the kingdom of France was beginning to dominate the cultural nd religious life of western Europe. In the centuries that followed, to scholars and to poets, to reforming churchmen and monks, to crusaders and the designers of churches, France was the hub of the universe. La douce France drew people like a magnet even though its kings were, until about 1200, comparatively insignificant figures. Then, thanks to the conquests and reforms of King Philip Augustus, France became a dominant force in political and economic terms as well, producing a saint-king, Louis IX, and in Philip IV, a ruler so powerful that he could dictate to popes and emperors. Spanning France's development across four centuries, Capetian France is a definitive book. This second edition has been carefully revised to take account of the very latest work, without losing the original book's popular balance between a compelling narrative and an fascinating examination of the period's main themes.

Denys Hay is one of the best known British historians of the Renaissance. His work is marked by a judicious and readable style, an equal interest in the affairs of England and Italy, and an ability to hold in balance the claims of political and cultural history. This collection brings together the important part of Professor Hay's work that has appeared as essays and represents all his major interests.

Adam Usk's chronicle, covering the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, is one of the most personal and idiosyncratic of medieval chronicles. It offers an eyewitness account of the fall of Richard II, the turbulent politics of Rome between 1402 and 1406, and the Glyn Dwr revolt. It is also a record of the remarkable life and career of an author who suffered exile and excommunication before finding peace in his last years.

This collection of essays by eight leading scholars is a landmark event in the study of crusading in the late middle ages. It is the outcome of an international network funded by the Leverhulme Trust whose members examined the persistence of crusading activity in the fifteenth century from three viewpoints, goals, agencies and resonances. The crusading fronts considered include the conflict with the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean and western Balkans, the Teutonic Order's activities in the Baltic region, and the Hussite crusades. The authors review criticism of crusading propaganda on behalf of the crusade, the influence on crusading of demands for Church reform, the impact of printing, expanding knowledge of the world beyond the Christian lands, and new sensibilities about the sufferings of non-combatants.

Published over a period of 20 years the essays collected together in this volume all relate to the lasting human preoccupation with cosmological matters and modern responses to them. The eclecticism of the typical medieval scholar might now seem astonishing, regrettable, amusing, or derisory, according to one's view of how rigid intellectual barriers should be. In Stars, Fate & Mind North argues that we will seriously misunderstand ancient and medieval thought if we are not prepared to share a willingness to look across such frontiers as those dividing astrology from ecclesiastical history, biblical chronology from astronomy, and angelic hierarchies from the planetary spheres, theology from the theory of the continuum, celestial laws from terrestrial, or the work of the clockmaker from the work of God himself, namely the universe. Surveying the work of such controversial scholars as Alexander Thom and Immanuel Velikovsky this varied volume brings together current scholarship on cosmology, and as the title suggest considers the confluence of matters of the stars, fate and the mind. The collection is accompanied by further commentary from the author and new illustrations.

The reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains one of the most puzzling issues in the literary history of medieval England. In From Lawmen to Plowmen, Stephen M. Yeager offers a fresh, insightful explanation for the alliterative structure of William Langland's Piers Plowman and the flourishing of alliterative verse satires in late medieval England by observing the similarities between these satires and the legal-homiletical literature of the Anglo-Saxon era.

Unlike Old English alliterative poetry, Anglo-Saxon legal texts and documents continued to be studied long after the Norman Conquest. By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland's Piers Plowman and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators. His conclusions establish a new genealogy for medieval England's vernacular literary tradition and offer a new way of approaching one of Middle English's literary classics.

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

This book is the first English translation of Felice di Michele Brancacci's diary of his 1422 mission to the court of Sultan Al-Ashraf Seyf-ad-Din Barsbay of Egypt. Following the purchase of Port of Pisa in 1421, and the building of a galley system, Florence went on to assume a more active role in Levant trade, and this rich text recounts the maiden voyage of the Florentine galleys to Egypt. The text portrays the transnational experiences of Brancacci including those between the East and West, Christians and Muslims, and the ancient and modern worlds. The accompanying critical introduction discusses the unexpected motifs in Brancacci's voyage, as well as tracing the aftershocks of what was a traumatic Egyptian experience for him. It shows that this aftershock was then measured, captured, and memorialized in the iconic image of Tribute Money, the fresco he commissioned from Masaccio, on his return to his own world in Florence.

The legacy of late medieval Franciscan thought is uncontested: for generations, the influence of late-13th and 14th century Franciscans on the development of modern thought has been celebrated by some and loathed by others. However, the legacy of early Franciscan thought, as it developed in the first generation of Franciscan thinkers who worked at the recently-founded University of Paris in the first half of the 13th century, is a virtually foreign concept in the relevant scholarship. The reason for this is that early Franciscans are widely regarded as mere codifiers and perpetrators of the earlier medieval, largely Augustinian, tradition, from which later Franciscans supposedly departed. In this study, leading scholars of both periods in the Franciscan intellectual tradition join forces to highlight the continuity between early and late Franciscan thinkers which is often overlooked by those who emphasize their discrepancies in terms of methodology and sources. At the same time, the contributors seek to paint a more nuanced picture of the tradition's legacy to Western thought, highlighting aspects of it that were passed down for generations to follow as well as the extremely different contexts and ends for which originally Franciscan ideas came to be employed in later medieval and modern thought.

This edited collection opens new ways to look at queenship in areas and countries not usually studied and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary work and geographic range of the field. This book is a forerunner in queenship and re-invents the reputations of the women and some of the men. The contributors answers questions about the nature of queenship, reputation of queens, and gender roles in the medieval and early modern west. The essays question the viability of propaganda, gossip, and rumor that still characterizes some queens in modern histories. The wide geographic range covered by the contributors moves queenship studies beyond France and England to understudied places such as Sweden and Hungary. Even the essays on more familiar countries explores areas not usually studied, such as the role of Edward II's stepmother, Margaret of France in Gaveston's downfall. The chapters clearly have a common thread and the editors' summary and description of the collection is valuable in assisting the reader. The collection is divided into two sections "Biography, Gossip, and History" and "Politics, Ambition, and Scandal." The editors and contributors, including Zita Eva Rohr and Elena Woodacre, are scholars at the top of their field and several and engage and debate with recent scholarship. This collection will appeal internationally to literary scholars and gender studies scholars as well historians interested in the countries included in the collection.

This encyclopedia provides 300 interdisciplinary, cross-referenced entries that document the effect of the plague on Western society across the four centuries of the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors. Encyclopedia of the Black Death is the first A-Z encyclopedia to cover the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors and effects in Europe and the Islamic world from 1347-1770. It also bookends the period with entries on Biblical plagues and the Plague of Justinian, as well as modern-era material regarding related topics, such as the work of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, the Third Plague Pandemic of the mid-1800s, and plague in the United States. Unlike previous encyclopedic works about this subject that deal broadly with infectious disease and its social or historical contexts, including the author's own, this interdisciplinary work synthesizes much of the research on the plague and related medical history published in the last decade in accessible, compellingly written entries. Controversial subject areas such as whether "plague" was bubonic plague and the geographic source of plague are treated in a balanced and unbiased manner. 300 A-Z interdisciplinary entries on medical matters and historical issues Each entry includes up-to-date resources for further research

This book surveys how the peoples bordering the Mediterranean, North Sea, English Channel and eastern Atlantic related to the sea in all its aspects between approximately 1000-1500 A.D. How was the sea represented in poems and other writings? What kinds of boats were used and how were they built? How easy was it to navigate on short or long passages? Was seaborne trade crucial to the economy of this area? Did naval warfare loom large in the minds of medieval rulers? What can be said more generally about the lives of those who went to sea or who lived by its shores? These are the major questions which are addressed in this book, which is based on extensive research in both maritime archives and also in secondary literature. It concludes by pointing out how the relatively enclosed maritime world of Western Europe was radically changed by the voyages of the late fifteenth century across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and round Africa to India.

This new edition contains the texts and translations of two key documents in medieval English history. The Dialogus de Scaccario, or Dialogue of the Exchequer, written by Richard fitzNigel - an insider at the court of Henry II (1154-89), has long formed the basis of historical knowledge of royal finance in the later twelfth century. It focuses on the annual audit of the sheriffs' accounts that led to the writing of the documents known as the pipe rolls. The Dialogus details the personnel and procedures of revenue collection at a time of critical importance for English government, administration, law, and economic development. It is a practical handbook rather than a theoretical treatise, and it occupies a unique place in English history.
The Constitutio Domus Regis, dating from the reign of Henry I (1100-35), is the first document to describe the payments made to that group of men (and one woman) whose duty it was to look after the king's bodily needs. Kings have always been surrounded by such people, but it is not until the early years of the twelfth century that we can begin to see these people in any detail. The Constitutio is an enigmatic text and has been largely misunderstood by those who have used it before now.
This edition is the first to collate all the relevant manuscripts fully. The two documents are accompanied by new readable translations, full introductions, and detailed notes, making them accessible and comprehensible twelfth-century English texts. Together, they provide a window into the workings and personnel of medieval English government.

The power, sophistication, unity and wealth of the late Anglo-Saxon state have been underestimated. The shadow of defeat in 1066, and an assumption that the Normans brought about strong government and a unification that had not previously been there, has prevented many of the remarkable features of Anglo-Saxon society from being seen. In The Anglo-Saxon State James Campbell shows how strong, unified and well-governed Anglo-Saxon England was and how numerous and wealthy were its inhabitants. Late Anglo-Saxon England was also a country with a political class considerably wider than just the earls and thegns. William Stubbs's vision of Anglo-Saxon England as a country with real representative institutions may indeed be truer than that of his denigrators. James Campbell's work demands the rethinking of Anglo-Saxon history.

Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (History of the English Bishops) is one of the most important medieval texts written c. 1125 by one of England's key historians of the period, William, Monk of Malmesbury. It is a is a vivid narrative on the English Church, its bishoprics and monasteries, from c.600 to William's contemporary era. Conceived as a companion piece to his Gesta Regum Anglorum, this historical work was a unique enterprise, and the result is a substantial book, elegantly written, full of original information, and characterized by intelligent interpretation and judgement.
Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (History of the English Bishops) is one of the most important medieval texts written c. 1125 by one of England's key historians of the period, William, Monk of Malmesbury. It is a is a vivid narrative on the English Church, its bishoprics and monasteries, from c.600 to William's contemporary era. Conceived as a companion piece to his Gesta Regum Anglorum, this historical work was a unique enterprise, and the result is a substantial book, elegantly written, full of original information, and characterized by intelligent interpretation and judgement.
This second volume by R. M. Thomson contains an introduction and detailed commentary to accompany the Latin text and translation of the work, appearing in Volume I. The introduction presents and analyzes the reasons behind the work - its structure, its main sources and program of research, and its influence and significance. The commentary, linked to the Latin text, discusses problems and questions revealed by the work, and illustrations appear throughout.