Contrary to prevalent military historical thinking, the early medieval general was not an ignorant warrior chieftain, but an able, astute, intelligent, and often very cunning commander. Through the use of contemporary literature, art, and archaeological evidence, this study argues that these generals could and did effectively exercise command control before, during, and after battle. Using the examples of a dozen or so leaders and drawing upon over 60 battles, this study brings to light the genius and the adaptability of medieval generals.

Two Medieval Toll Registers from Tarascon presents an edition, translation, and discussion of two vernacular toll registers from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Provence. These two registers are a valuable new source for the economic, linguistic, and transportation history of medieval France, offering a window onto the commercial life of Tarascon, a fortified town on the east bank of the Rhone between Avignon and Arles. William D. Paden discusses the developing fiscal policy of the counts of Provence, for whom the tolls were collected, and the practice and vocabulary of medieval toll-keeping. An afterword considers the toll registers in relation to the poetry of troubadours, arguing that the realism of the registers and the idealism of troubadour poetry overlapped in the world of medieval Tarascon.

"Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent "argues that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized. Women bought, sold, sued, lent money, and contracted debts with little legal or financial oversight of men. Contrary to the widespread view that women exercised economic autonomy only in widowhood, Hutton argues that marital status was not the chief determinant of women's economic activities in the mid-fourteenth century.

Spanning the artificial divide between medieval and early modern history, this collection of essays shows how men and women tried to put their ideals into practice, sometimes alone, but more commonly within the shared environment of cloister, college or city. The volume is presented to the distinguished medievalist Barrie Dobson in celebration of his 70th birthday, and takes the reader from a rural landscape to the London of Thomas More, and from the forests of Robin Hood to the central law courts.

Medieval York provides a comprehensive history of what is now considered England's most famous surviving medieval city, covering nearly a thousand years. The volume examines York from its post-Roman revival as a town (c. 600) to the major changes of the 1530s and 1540s, which in many ways brought an end to the Middle Ages in England. York was one of the leading English towns after London, and in status almost always the 'second city'. Much research and publication has been carried out on various aspects of medieval York, but this volume seeks to cover the field in its entirety. David Palliser offers an up-to-date and broad-based account of the city by employing the evidence of written documents, archaeology (especially on the rich results of recent city centre excavations), urban morphology, numismatics, art, architecture, and literature. Special attention is paid to the city's religious drama and its wealth of surviving stained glass. The story of Medieval York is set in a wide context to make comparisons with other English and Continental towns, to establish how far York's story was distinctive or was typical of other English towns which have been less fortunate in the survival of their medieval fabric. It is essential reading for anyone interested in York's past and in its rich heritage of medieval churches, guildhalls, houses, streets, and city walls - the most complete medieval circuit in England.

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.

It is equally true that the Reformation was inspired and defined by the Bible and that the Bible was reshaped by the intellectual, political, and cultural forces of the Reformation. In this book, a distinguished scholar-whose contributions to the field of religious studies have won him wide renown-explores this relationship, examining both the role of the Bible in the Reformation and the effect of the Reformation on the text of the Bible, Biblical studies, preaching and exegesis, and European culture in general. Jaroslav Pelikan begins by discussing the philological foundations of the "reformation" of the Biblical text, focusing on the revival of Greek and Hebrew language study and the important contributions to textual criticism by humanist scholars. He then examines the changing patterns of interpretation and communication of the Biblical text, the proliferation of vernacular versions of scripture and their impact on various national cultures, and the impact of the Reformation Bible on art, music, and literature of the period. The book is richly illustrated with examples of early printed editions of Bibles, commentaries, sermons, vernacular translations, and other works with Biblical themes, all of which are identified and discussed. The book serves as the catalog for a major exhibition of early Bibles and Reformation texts that has been organized at Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, and will also be shown at the Yale Center for British Art, the Houghton Library and the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Copublished with the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University

In the thirteenth century, sculptures of Synagoga and Ecclesia paired female personifications of the Synagogue defeated and the Church triumphant became a favored motif on cathedral facades in France and Germany. Throughout the centuries leading up to this era, the Jews of northern Europe prospered financially and intellectually, a trend that ran counter to the long-standing Christian conception of Jews as relics of the pre-history of the Church. In The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City, Nina Rowe examines the sculptures as defining elements in the urban Jewish-Christian encounter. She locates the roots of the Synagoga-Ecclesia motif in antiquity and explores the theme s public manifestations at the cathedrals of Reims, Bamberg, and Strasbourg, considering each example in relation to local politics and culture. Ultimately, she demonstrates that royal and ecclesiastical policies to restrain the religious, social, and economic lives of Jews in the early thirteenth century found a material analog in lovely renderings of a downtrodden Synagoga, placed in the public arena of the city square."

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is one of the most important sets of historical documents concerning the history of the British Isles. Without these vital accounts we would have virtually no knowledge of some of the key events in the history of these islands during the dark ages and it would be impossible to write the history of the English from the Romans to the Norman Conquest. The history it tells is not only that witnessed by its compilers, but also that recorded by earlier annalists, whose work is in many cases preserved nowhere else. At present there are nine known versions or fragments of the original 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' in existence. All of the extant versions vary (sometimes greatly) in content and quality, and crucially all of the surviving manuscripts are copies, so it is not known for certain where or when the first version of the Chronicle was composed. The translation that has been used for this edition is not a translation of any one Chronicle; rather, it is a conflation of readings from many different versions containing primarily the translation of Rev. James Ingram from 1828. The footnotes are all those of Rev. Ingram and are supplied for the sake of completeness. This edition also includes the complete Parker Manuscript. The book is illustrated throughout with paintings and engravings.

The Anglo-Scottish border in the late medieval and early modern period was a highly contested region; both a militarized zone and a place of cultural contact and exchange. The contributors to this volume explore the role of this borderland in the construction of both Scottish and English identities, seeking insight into the role that Scotland and England played in one another's imaginations. Texts that originated in, pass through, or comment on the Anglo-Scottish border reveal it as a crucial third term in the articulation of Scottish and English national consciousness and cultural identity.

Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender. Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, it illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

"Although the Igbo constitute one of the largest ethnic nationalities of Nigeria and the West African sub-region, little is know about their political history before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This book is then a pioneer study of the broad changes Igbo political systems have undergone since the prehistoric period"--

The Yorkists include both the most wicked king in English history, Richard III, and the most tragic, his nephew Edward V, one of the Princes in the Tower. They had come to the throne in 1461, when Edward IV, who traced his claim to Edward III, replaced the ineffectual Henry VI as king. Forced into exile in 1470, Edward returned to power after the bloody battle of Towton in 1470 finally ended Lancastrian opposition. His reign was ended by his premature death in 1483, leaving behind his son Edward, a minor, as his heir. This led to Richard III's ursurpation, ended two years later by his defeat and death at Bosworth Field at the hands of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII and the founder of a new dynasty, marrying Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV. The Yorkists were one of the two main contending parties in England's first great civil war, the Wars of the Roses. They have been immortalised by Shakespeare not only in his Richard III but also in his three parts of Henry VI. Anne Crawford examines the truth behind both the characters of these kings and behind the stories in the plays, including the death of the duke of Clarence by drowning in a butt of malmsey and the celebrated murder of his nephews, Edward V and Richard, duke of York, by their uncle, Richard III.

This book provides a needed overview of the scholarship on medieval public culture and popular movements such as the Peace of God, heresy, and the crusades and illustrates how a changing sense of the populus, the importance of publics and public opinion and public spheres was influential in the evolution of medieval cultures. Public opinion did play an important role, even in the Middle Ages; it did not wait until the era of modern history to do so. Using modern research on such aspects of culture as textual communities, large and small publics, cults, crowds, rumor, malediction, gossip, dispute resolution and the European popular revolution, the author focuses on the Peace of God movement, the era of Church reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the rise and combat of heresy, the crusades, and the works of fourteenth-century political thinkers such as Marsiglio of Padua regarding the role of the populus as the basis for the analysis. The pattern of changes reflected in this study argues that just as in the modern world the simplistic idea of "the public " was a phantom. Instead there were publics large and small that were influential in shaping the cultures of the era under review.

Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and intellectual developments of the intervening years.
Paradoxically, Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The legend became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they had held God's favour under Charlemagne and held out hope that they could one day reclaim their special place in sacred history. Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation for the last battle between good and evil, promised just this to the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could remind men of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their place as defenders of the faith during the First Crusade.
An Empire of Memory uses the legend of Charlemagne, an often-overlooked current in early medieval thought, to look at how the contours of the relationship between East and West moved across centuries, particularly in the period leading up to the First Crusade.

This innovative study looks at a previously unstudied dimension of medieval queenship, examining the ways in which three fourteenth-century English queens--Margaret of France, Isabella of France, and Philippa of Hainault--exercised power and authority. These women were consorts and dowagers for overlapping periods, creating a continuous transition from one queen to the next. It thus provides a unique perspective on normative queenly behaviour and political culture, formulating valuable insights into gender, status; the concept of the crown, and power and authority.

Exploring the effects of war on state power in early modern Europe, this book asks if military competition increased rulers' power over their subjects and forged more modern states, or if the strains of war break down political and administrative systems. Comparing England and the Netherlands in the age of warrior princes such as Henry VIII and Charles V, it examines the development of new military and fiscal institutions, and asks how mobilization for war changed political relationships throughout society.
Towns in England, such as Norwich, York, Exeter, and Rye, are compared with towns in the Netherlands, such as Antwerp, Leiden, 's-Hertogenbosch and Valenciennes, to see how the magistrates' relations with central government and the urban populace were modified by war. Great noblemen from the Howard and Percy families are set alongside their equivalents from the houses of Cro and Egmond to examine the role of recruitment, army command, and heroic reputation in maintaining noble power. The wider interactions of subjects and rulers in wartime are reviewed to measure how effectively war extended princes' claims on their subjects' loyalty and service, their ambitions to control news and opinion and to promote national identity, and their ability to manage the economy and harness religious change to dynastic purposes. The result is a compelling but nuanced picture of societies and polities tested and shaped by the pressures of ever more demanding warfare.

Examines a range of texts commemorating European holy women from the ninth through fifteenth centuries. Explores the relationship between memorial practices and identity formation. Draws upon much of the recent scholarly interest in the nature and uses of memory.

This book presents an edition of seventeen manuscript sermon texts for the preaching of the crusades from the thirteenth to the early fourteenth centuries by five prominent scholars and churchmen. The majority of these texts have never been printed before. These sermons are unique sources for the study of the crusades and medieval preaching, two vibrant areas of medieval studies in both academic teaching and research. Accompanying the Latin texts is an English translation, making these sources accessible to a wider circle of students and scholars.

Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, is legendary in the United States today: counties, cars, caverns, shopping malls and bridges all bear his name. This work explains the historical importance of his expedition, a journey that began at Tampa Bay in 1539 and ended in Arkansas in 1543. De Soto's explorations, the first European penetration of eastern North America, preceded a demographic disaster for the aboriginal peoples in the region. Old World diseases, perhaps introduced by the de Soto expedition and certainly by other Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, killed many thousands of Indians. By the middle of the 18th century only a few remained alive. The de Soto narratives provide the first European account of many of these Indian societies as they were at the time of European contact. This work interprets these and other 16th-century accounts in the light of new archaeological information, resulting in a more comprehensive view of the native peoples. Matching de Soto's camps to sites where artifacts from the de Soto era have been found, the authors reconstruct his route in Florida and at the same time clarify questions about the social geography and political relationships of the Florida Indians. They link names once known only from documents (for example, the Uzita, who occupied territory at the de Soto landing site, and the Aguacaleyquen of north peninsular Florida) to actual archaeological remains and sites.

"Crown and Nobility" traces the development of the relationship between kings and nobles in late medieval England. It shows how the differing abilities and personalities of the late medieval English kings powerfully affected their relationship with the nobility. The author examines the contrast between the dominant style of Edward I and both the weakness of Edward II and the chivalric reputation of Edward III, and reveals how the ineptitude of Henry VI did much to provoke the political crisis of the mid-fifteenth century, which led to the downfall of the House of Lancaster.

Much of the political history of late medieval England was played out against a background of war, and Anthony Tuck vividly describes the Welsh and Scottish wars, the great victories in France, and the final debacle under Henry VI. He shows how success and setback in war crucially affected the relationship between the king and his nobles.

For this new edition the author has revised the original text to take account of recent scholarship. The book now includes a new epilog discussing historiographical developments since the book was first published. There is also an enlarged and updated bibliography.