A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR

'A triumph' Guardian

'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook

'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday

Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.

In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process.

Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

The State is the most powerful of political ideas but where does it come from? This broad-ranging new study traces the history of the word and the concept back to the systems of law and justice created by medieval kings and shows how legal institutions acquired political force.

The variety of experience available to medieval scholars and the vitality of medieval thought are both reflected in this collection of original essays by distinguished historians. Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages is presented to Margaret Gibson, whose own work has ranged from Boethius to Lanfranc and to the study of the Bible in the middle ages.

Master-Servant Childhood offers a new understanding of childhood in the Middle Ages as a form of master-servant relation embedded in an ancient sense of time as a correspondence between earthly change and eternal order. It challenges the misnomer that children were 'little adults' in the Middle Ages and corrects the prevalent misconceptions that childhood was unimportant, unrecognized or disregarded. The book argues for the value of studying childhood as a structure of thought and feeling and as an important avenue for exploring large scale historical changes in our sense of what it is to be and become human.

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, the First Crusade, and its linked attacks on Jews at home.

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place included such varied works as topographical histories, literary anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel literature, and maps.
By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities, and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world, reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping tradition in the Islamic world.
Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of religion and family to notions of community and belonging among Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.

From the earliest days of the organized Christian community, the bishop was the most important local official, a pivotal figure who discharged both secular and spiritual functions. As in most political arrangements, his appointment meant a transfer of power from one position of authority to another, while his tenure in office revealed the different ways in which his influence could be felt. The King's Bishops is the first detailed comparative study of patronage as an instrument of power in the relations between kings and bishops in England and Normandy after the Conquest. Esteemed medievalist Everett U. Crosby considers new perspectives of medieval state-building and the vexed relations between secular and ecclesiastical authority. Through a rich and detailed examination of the background and career of each of the bishops in the seventeen sees in England and in the seven sees in Normandy, this study re-considers the fundamental assumptions and practices - including royal prerogative, clerical independence, papal authority and family claims - underlying the structures of power in the period.

There are saints in Orthodox Christian culture who overturn the conventional concept of sainthood. Their conduct may be unruly and salacious, they may blaspheme and even kill - yet, mysteriously, those around them treat them with even more reverence. Such saints are called 'holy fools'. In this pioneering study Sergey A. Ivanov examines the phenomenon of holy foolery from a cultural standpoint. He identifies its prerequisites and its development in religious thought, and traces the emergence of the first hagiographic texts describing these paradoxical saints. He describes the beginnings of holy foolery in Egyptian monasteries of the fifth century, followed by its high point in the cities of Byzantium, with an eventual decline in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also compares the important Russian tradition of holy fools, which in some form has survived to this day.

As one of the greatest of the military orders that were generated in the Church, the Order of the Hospital of St John was a major landowner and a significant political presence in most European states. It was also a leading player in the settlements established in the Levant in the wake of the crusades. It survives today. In this source-based and up-to-date account of its activities and internal history in the first two centuries of its existence, attention is particularly paid to the lives of the brothers and sisters who made up its membership and were professed religious. Themes in the book relate to the tension that always existed between the Hospital's roles as both a hospitaller and a military order and its performance as an institution that was at the same time a religious order and a great international corporation.

Although much has been written about Columbus's life in Italy and Spain, little has been written about his formative years in Portugal. This work is the first book-length analysis of Columbus's stay in Portugal and Madeira from 1476 to 1485 and his later experiences in the Portuguese islands of the Azores and the Madeiras. The work stresses the influence the Portuguese had in educating Columbus about the sea, and it depicts his famous voyage to the New World as a logical sequence of the pioneering voyages of the Portuguese in the North Atlantic and along the West Coast of Africa. The work attempts to sort legend from fact and debunks the many myths about Columbus's stays on the island of Madeira.

Edited and translated by: Chibnall, Marjorie;

This is a study of two topics of central importance in late medieval history: the impact of war, and the control of disorder. Making war and making law were the twin goals of the state, and the author examines the effect of the evolution of royal government in England and France. Ranging broadly between 1000 and 1400, he focuses principally on the period c.1290 to c.1360, and compares developments in the two countries in four related areas: the economic and political costs of war; the development of royal justice; the crown's attempt to control private violence; and the relationship between public opinion and government action. He argues that as France suffered near breakdown under repeated English invasions, the authority of the crown became more acceptable to the internal warring factions; whereas the English monarchy, unable to meet the expectations for internal order which arose partly from its own ambitious claims to be `keeper of the peace', had to devolve much of its judicial powers. In these linked problems of war, justice, and public order may lie the origins of English `constitutionalism' and French `absolutism'.

This is the first study to examine the rise and fall of a medieval religious group, the Order of Apostles, that began with orthodox support but ended in the fires of heresy. Originating in 1260 in Parma the group was founded by Gerard Segarelli who believed that a life of apostolic poverty was the true path of Christian devotion. Segarelli was initially supported by the Church but as his cohort grew in number and fame he was charged with heresy by the powerful Franciscans, was tried, and burnt as a heretic. The Order's control was assumed by Fra Dolcino who led the Apostles into direct opposition to the Roman Church and was himself executed in 1307. This is an important study presenting new findings in the history of medieval heresy, as well as placing the Order of Apostles within the larger context of political, economic and social history. By examining the rise and fall of the Apostles Pierce shows the dramatic consequences of the transformation of European society during the high Middle Ages.

The Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. This interdisciplinary work presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era. The essays explore theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. This book will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to our knowledge of feudalism and finance in France and Spain. Divided into four sections, it covers the use rulers made of courts, parlements, and assemblies for ceremonial, political and fiscal purposes; the institutional formation of Catalonia; comparative studies of France, Catalonia and Aragon in the twelfth century; and monetary and fiscal policies of contemporary rulers.

Elizabeth I is probably the most famous English woman ever to have lived. She has been celebrated as a great stateswoman, during whose reign England acquired some degree of security in the troubled European arena and at the same time began to lay the foundations for its future empire. She presided over a country undergoing a cultural renaissance previously unimagined. By the time of her death at the age of seventy in 1603, she was being heralded as rival to the Virgin Mary, as a second Queen of Earth and Heaven, as a woman more than mortal women. She has provided subject-matter for innumerable books: seventy biographies have appeared since 1890 and it is impossible to list the enormous number of historical novels based on some part of her life.However, among the many books written about Elizabeth I there is none like this one: Bassnett looks at the life and achievements of Elizabeth from a twentieth-century feminist perspective and considers her as writer, politician, scholar and woman. As a result she succeeds in presenting a more rounded portrait of a figure who has fascinated successive generations but whose private and public life has frequently been the subject of fantasy and speculation.

In the last twenty years scholarship on late antique and early medieval Ravenna has resulted in a certain number of publications mainly focused on the fields of architecture, mosaics and archaeology. On the contrary, much less attention has been paid on labour - both manual and intellectual - as well as the structure of production and objects derived from manufacturing activities, despite the fact that Ravenna is the place which preserves the highest number of historical evidence among all centres of the late Roman Mediterranean. Its cultural heritage is vast and composite, ranging from papyri to inscriptions, from ivories to marbles, as well as luxury objects, pottery, and coins. Starting from concrete typologies of hand-manufactured goods existing in the Ravennate milieu, the book aims at exploring the multifaceted traditions of late antique and early Byzantine handicraft from the fourth to the eighth century AD. Its perspective is to pay attention more on patronage, social taste, acculturation, workers and the economic industry of production which supported the demand, circulation and distribution of artefacts, than on the artistic evaluation of the objects themselves.

The reign of King Stephen (1135-54) is famous as a period of weak government, as Stephen and his rival the Empress Matilda contended for power. This is a study of medieval kingship at its most vulnerable. It also shows how individuals and institutions enabled the monarchy to survive. A contemporary chronicler described the reign as "nineteen long winters in which Christ and his saints were asleep". Historians today refer to it simply as 'the Anarchy'. The weakness of government was the result of a disputed succession. Stephen lost control over Normandy, the Welsh marches, and much of the North. Contemporaries noted as signs of weakness the tyranny of the lords of castles, and the break-down of coinage. Stephen remained king for his lifetime, but leading churchmen and laymen negotiated a settlement whereby the crown passed to the Empress's son the future Henry II. This volume by leading scholars gives an original and up-to-date analysis of these major themes, and explains how the English monarchy was able to survive the Anarchy of King Stephen's reign.

Definitive account of the English garrison at Calais - the largest contemporary force in Europe - in the wider context of European warfare in the middle ages. This is the book on the Calais garrison we have been waiting for. COLIN RICHMOND For over 200 years, following its capture by Edward III in 1347, the town of Calais was in English hands; after 1453 it remained the last English possession on the continent, a commercial, cultural, diplomatic and military frontier, until its recapture by the French in 1558. This book - the first full-length study so to do - examines the Calais garrison, the largest standing military force available to the English crown. Based on extensive archival research, it covers recruitment and service in the garrison, the problems of pay and logistics, the weaponry and tactics used, and the chivalric and professional ethos among the soldiers. It also investigates the effectiveness of English arms against their European counterparts, through a detailed study of the failed Burgundian siege of 1436 and the successful French siege of 1558. Overall, it reaffirms the importance of Calais to successive medieval and early modern English kings, and challenges the perceived notion that England lagged behind its northwest European rivals in terms of military technology and effectiveness. The Calais garrison is placed in the wider context of the development of European warfare in general during this period. Dr DAVID GRUMMITT is Lecturer in British History, University of Kent.

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio is one of the most discussed sources for the Norman Conquest of England. Its authorship and date cannot be established entirely beyond dispute, but the weight of scholarly opinion supports a date of composition of 1068 or earlier, by Guy, bishop of Amiens, thus making it the earliest surviving account. Whatever its date, the Carmen remains a source of intrinsic interest and importance, and one used by some of the great chroniclers of the period, such as Orderic Vitalis. It is an epic poem, concerned with some of the most momentous events of a remarkable year, in which Halley's comet was a disturbing portent of undisclosed disasters. For this second edition, Frank Barlow has written an entirely new and substantial historical introduction, incorporating the scholarly research of a generation. He has also provided a fresh translation and notes, as well as revising the Latin text of the 1972 edition by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz.

Basingstoke is frequently seen as a very modern town, the product of the last decades of the 20th century. In reality it has a long, rich and prosperous history. From its beginnings c.1000 it became a significant market centre for the area around, and a place on the route to London from the west. By 1500 it was among the top 60 towns in England by wealth and taxpayers, and the centre of a major industrial area, whose manufactured cloths formed part of international patterns of trade. Moreover, it is well documented particularly for the 15th and 16th century, when it was at its peak, and should provide a useful addition to the limited number of studies of small medieval towns. Much of the old town has been swept away by the shopping centre, but something of the medieval footprint survives in its street beyond this, in a few surviving buildings and above all in its magnificent church. This book examines these features as well as the families, whether outsiders or locals, who made the most of the new thriving economic conditions, and whose dynamism helped create the town's expansion.