"England and its Rulers" has established itself as an attractive and authoritative account of English history from 1066. For this third edition, three new chapters have been added, the bibliography and suggested further reading sections have been fully updated, and additions and amendments have been made throughout.
New edition of the standard introduction to this popular period of English history.
Assesses the reigns of successive monarchs including William the Conqueror, Henry I, Richard the Lionheart, and King John.
Includes an epilogue on the reign of Edward I (1272-1307).
Three new chapters examine the social and economic history of the period and the British dimension of English history.

"This book illuminates the origins of the great European witch hunts by placing early witch trials in the comparative light of other criminal proceedings in Basel, Lucerne and Nuremberg. The study reveals that the increasingly harsh treatment was paralleled by mounting judicial severity in general, as well as by a keen interest in social control"--

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.

The volume contains contributions dedicated to the person and the work of Shalva Nutsubidze and his scholarly interests: the Christian Orient from the fifth to the seventh century, the Georgian eleventh century, the Neoplatonic philosopher Ioane Petritsi and his epoch and Shota Rustaveli and mediaeval Georgian culture. Among the articles are a new edition and translation of the original Georgian author's Preface to the lost Commentary on the Psalms by Ioane Petritsi and the editio princeps with an English translation of an epistle of Nicetas Stethatos (eleventh century), whose Greek original is lost. The traditions of Georgian mediaeval thought are considered in their historical context within the Byzantine Commonwealth and are traced in both philosophy and poetry.

There are several reasons why the chronicle is particularly suited as the topic of a yearbook. In the first place there is its ubiquity: all over Europe and throughout the Middle Ages chronicles were written, both in Latin and in the vernacular, and not only in Europe but also in the countries neighbouring on it, like those of the Arabic world. Secondly, all chronicles raise such questions as by whom, for whom, or for what purpose were they written, how do they reconstruct the past, what determined the choice of verse or prose, or what kind of literary influences are discernable in them. Finally, many chronicles have been beautifully illuminated, and the relation between text and image leads to a wholly different set of questions. The yearbook" The Medieval Chronicle" aims to provide a representative survey of the on-going research in the field of chronicle studies, illustrated by examples from specific chronicles from a wide variety of countries, periods and cultural backgrounds. "The Medieval Chronicle" is published in cooperation with the "Medieval Chronicle Society."

The way people see the past tells us much about their present interests and about their sense of identity. This book examines both what men of the day knew about their past, and in particular about the Roman Empire, and shows how such knowledge was used to authenticate claims and attitudes. These original essays, by distinguished scholars, are wide-ranging both geographically, from Russia to Iberia, and in scope, dealing with legal, ecclesiastical, noble and scholarly attitudes.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is recognized as a masterpiece among the historical literature of medieval England and Europe. Completed in 731, it comprises in a single flowing narrative a coherent history of the conversion of the English peoples to Christianity, and the story of the island kingdoms and churches from the 590s to the early eighth century, prefaced by a sketch of the earlier history of Britain. In 1969 the Clarendon Press published the new edition in Oxford Medieval Texts, edited by Bertram Colgrave and Sir Roger Mynors. Mynors's masterly text and textual introduction replaced much of Charles Plummer's great edition of 1896; but the historical notes did not attempt to match in scale and detail Plummer's second volume of commentary. To fill this gap the late Professor J. M. Wallace-Hadrill devoted the last years of his life to a new commentary, one of the finest and most mature fruits of his scholarship - more succinct than Plummer, tauter, more relevant, above all drawing together and adding to the findings of a galaxy of modern scholars. Prepared for the press by Thomas Charles-Edwards, helped by Patrick Wormald and others, this book completes the new Bede, and is prefaced by a paper characteristic of Professor Wallace-Hadrill on 'Bede and Plummer'.

The study of the Syriac magical traditions has largely been marginalised within Syriac studies, with the earliest treatments displaying a disparaging attitude towards both the culture and its magical practices. Despite significant progress in more recent scholarship in respect of the culture, its magical practices and their associated literatures remain on the margins of the scholarly imagination. This volume aims to open a discussion on the history of the field, to evaluate how things have progressed, and to suggest a fruitful way forward. In doing so, this volume demonstrates the incredible riches contained within the Syriac magical traditions, and the necessity of their study.

Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe examines key aspects related to the reception of Ibero-Islamic architecture in medieval Iberia and 19th-century Europe. It challenges prevalent readings of architecture and interiors whose creation was the result of cultural encounters. As Mudejar and neo-Moorish architecture are closely connected to the Islamic world, concepts of identity, nationalism, religious and ethnic belonging, as well as Orientalism and Islamoscepticism significantly shaped the way in which they have been perceived over time. This volume offers art historical and socio-cultural analysis of selected case studies from Spain to Russia and opens the door to a better understanding of interconnected cultural and artistic phenomena. Contributors are (in order of appearance) Francine Giese, Ariane Varela Braga, Michael A. Conrad, Katrin Kaufmann, Sarah Keller, Elena Paulino Montero, Luis Araus Ballesteros, Ekaterina Savinova, Christian Schweizer, Alejandro Jimenez Hernandez and Laura Alvarez Acosta.

"The Culture of Christendom" brings together original essays by distinguished historians on medieval European history. Their range reflects the breadth of Denis Bethell's own interests, which though centred on the high medieval church encompassed the culture of the middle ages as a whole.

A Companion to Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Cordoba cover the history and culture of Roman, late antique, Visigoth and al-Andalus Cordoba in nineteen contributions, from the foundation of the city in the 169/168 B.C. by the praetor Marcus Claudius Marcellus to the end of the Muslim period in 1236 B.C., when the city fell into the hands of Ferdinand III the Saint, King of Castile. Making use of archaeological data and historical sources, combined with the latest research on the various fields under study, its authors give a compelling account of Cordoba’s most important archaeological, urban, political, legal, social, cultural and religious facets throughout the most exciting fifteen centuries of the city.

Over the past thousand years, the bloodiest game of the king-of-the-hill has been for supremacy on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon. This book recounts the stirring saga of the Knights Templar, the Christian warrior-monks who occupied the sacred Mount in the aftermath of the butchery of the First Crusade. Recruited to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience intended to lead only to martyrdom on the battlefield, they were totally dedicated to the pious paradox that the wholesale slaughter of non-believers would earn the eternal gratitude of the Prince of Peace. The Templars amassed great wealth, which they used to finance their two hundred years of war against Muslims on the desert, in the mountains, and up the broad sweep of the Nile valley. The Templars' reward for those two centuries of military martyrdom was to be arrested by pope and king, tortured by the Inquisition, and finally decreed out of existence. But their legend and legacy just would not die. In telling the incredible story of the Knights Templar, the author's clear explanation of the cultural and religious differences among the Templars' enemies and friends in the Middle East gives fresh understanding of the people who populate this restless region. Here are the Sunnies and the Shiites, the Kurds and Armenians, the Arabs and Turks, who figure so prominently in today's headlines. The similarity of their antagonisms today and those of eight hundred years ago are often so striking as to be eerie. Dungeon, Fire & Sword is a brilliant work of narrative history that can be read as an adventure story, a morality play, or a lesson in the politics of warfare.

This is volume two of a two-volume set which brings together leading scholars to present current knowledge and thinking about European history between 1400 and 1600: in the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. The work should be of value to students, specialists and non-specialists alike. 40 scholars in the field present the state of knowledge about the major themes, main controversies and fruitful directions for research of European history in this era. This volume covers the early stages of the process by which newly-established confessional structures began to work their way among the populace.

This book is the first to bring together all that is known about the humanly-modified and cultivated landscapes of Middle America just prior to the European conquest. It assesses the agricultural and human-environment conditions existing at that time, and its implications for various contemporary themes ranging from global change to the presumed 'environment friendly' Native American.

First English translation of the chivalric biography of one of France's leading figures of the middle ages. Jean le Meingre, Marechal Boucicaut (1364-1421), was the very flower of chivalry. From his earliest years at the royal court in Paris, he distinguished himself in knightly pursuits: sorties against seditious French nobles, ceremonial jousts against the English enemy, crusading in Tunisia and Prussia, the composition of courtly verses, and the establishment of a chivalric order for the defence of ladies, the Order of the Enterprise of the White Lady of theGreen Shield. He was named Marshal of France at the age of only 27. His chivalric biography, finished in 1409, is one of the most important accounts of the life of a knight from the Middle Ages. Whilst full of praise, it isalso highly partisan and carefully selective; it glosses over the darker, much less successful, side of his career - in particular his participation in the catastrophic Nicopolis crusade (1396) and his governorship of Genoa, whichcame to an end shortly after the completion of the biography, when a rebellion forced him to leave the city, five years before his capture at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and death in England in 1421. This first English translation makes available to a wider audience a text that sheds light on the history of France, on crusading in Prussia and the Mediterranean, and on the complicated politics of Italy and the papacy during the Great Schism. It isa highly important contribution to our understanding of chivalric mentalities and attitudes in late-medieval France. It is presented with an introduction and notes. Dr CRAIG TAYLOR is Reader in Medieval History at theUniversity of York; JANE H.M. TAYLOR is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University.

Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the local abbot and then abducted by her feudal superior. Agnes Grantham was a successful businesswoman ambushed and assaulted in a forest whilst on her way to dine with the Master of St Leonard's Hospital. Alice Brathwell was a respectable widow who attracted the attentions of a supposedly aristocratic conman. These are their stories.

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.

Collecting sixteen thought-provoking new essays by leading medievalists, this volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies. Reflecting Davies' interest in identities, political culture and the workings of power in medieval Britain, the essays range across ten centuries, looking at a variety of key topics. Issues explored range from the historical representations of peoples and the changing patterns of power and authority, to the notions of 'core' and 'periphery' and the relationship between local conditions and international movements. The political impact of words and ideas, and the parallels between developments in Wales and those elsewhere in Britain, Ireland and Europe are also discussed. Appreciations of Rees Davies, a bibliography of his works, and Davies' own farewell speech to the History Faculty at the University of Oxford complete this outstanding tribute to a much-missed scholar.

While Karl Leyser was pre-eminent in the English-speaking world as the historian of medieval Germany, his work has increased our understanding of European society as a whole. In particular, he brought to life nobles and ecclesiastics, by combining a profound knowledge of the primary sources with an imaginative ability to understand motives and attitudes. Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages brings together essays by Karl Leyser's pupils, many of them distinguished historians in their own right, on subjects which he himself illuminated.

Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis is the oldest surviving example of historiography in the French vernacular. It was written in Lincolnshire c.1136-37 and is, in large part, an Anglo-Norman verse adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Its narrative covers the period from the sixth century until the death of the Conqueror's son William Rufus in 1100.
This is an important text in historiographic terms, less as an historical source than as an early example of informative literature written in a secular perspective for a predominantly baronial audience. It illustrates the multilingualism and multiculturalism of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Britain, and shows the descendants of the Norman conquerors seeking to integrate themselves culturally into their adoptive homeland during the 1130s. It also ranks among the earliest extant witnesses of the rise of courtly literature in French, and of named female literary patronage.
This edition offers a critical text of one of the chronicle's four extant manuscripts. There is an introduction placing the poem in its social and literary contexts, followed by the medieval text, edited according to critical interventionist principles and comprising 6532 rhyming octosyllables. A facing modern English prose translation, the first concern of which is accuracy, aims also to convey the tone and style of the original rather than provide a strictly literal rendering of it. The extensive explanatory notes to the text are followed by a bibliography and a complete index of place and personal names.

This book explores the late medieval English cults which evolved around 'political martyrs' - men who had been violently killed in political circumstances and later venerated, though never canonized.It is the first monograph to study political martyrdom. It innovatively locates late medieval cults of political martyrs in their religious, social and cultural context. It uses a broad range of primary sources. It provides a detailed study of important case studies.This book explores the late medieval English cults which evolved around 'political martyrs'. By examining these cults the richness of political culture is revealed, and insights offered into the ways in which belief, worship, social and civic identities, and political language and practice were continuously constructed and re-constructed.

This is the first full scholarly study of the relationship between native secular law and the Church in medieval Wales. The interaction was close, despite Archbishop Pecham's condemnation of native law as the work of the devil. Huw Pryce assesses the influence of the Church on Welsh law, examining the participation of churchmen in the composition of lawbooks and the administration of legal processes and analysing ecclesiastical criticism of native customs, notably those concerning marriage. He also considers the extent to which Welsh law defended the authority and possessions of the Church, focusing in particular on the status of clerics and on rights of sanctuary and lordship. The book throws revealing new light on both secular law and the Church in Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a study of the impact of ecclesiastical reform on a society perceived by some contemporaries as barbarian and immoral, this scholarly and lucid account makes an important contribution to medieval history.