The life of "that notorious woman", Lucy de Thweng, is used as a prism through which to consider the agency of aristocratic women in the Middle Ages. The Yorkshire heiress, Lucy de Thweng, was married as a child to her first husband but later divorced him, entered into an adulterous relationship with another man, was forced into marriage to a second husband, and then, after a period of widowhood, married for the third time to a congenial partner of her own choice. This sounds a remarkable and unusual story - but was it? This book uses the episodes of Lucy's life to explore how far she was exceptional in her time and rank and highlights aspects of personality and personal relationships which are not often recognized. It undertakes extensive investigations into divorce in contemporary aristocratic families and extra-marital sexual relationships by women, as well as discussing the marriage of heiresses and the pressures to remarry which widows endured. These show that the theoretical religious and secular restraints on marriage and sex were often ignored, by both men and women, and how women, particularly if they were heiresses, were able to make their own decisions in these matters. As the legitimate procreation of children within the licensed environment of marriage was the forum for the succession to landed estates, the book also considers how this behaviour affected those estates. BRIDGET WELLS-FURBY is an independent scholar whose interests lie chiefly in late medieval landed estates and their context.

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The deaths of husbands radically changed women's lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

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.

Historians of premodern Europe often think in terms of 'small worlds': a series of regional societies functioning independently of each other. This -approach works well for isolated areas but is less obviously applicable to England, the most centralised country in Europe. How far England was centrally controlled and how far power in reality remained in the localities are key considerations in understanding English history both in the middle ages and after-wards.
The essays in "Regionalism and Revision" all address these questions, both by analysing how the problem should be approached and by examining what the exercise of power involved in local terms. Did the gentry dominate local office by virtue of their intrinsic importance in their counties or were they dependent for the continuation of their power and wealth on the renewal of their commissions from the central government? How did magnates mediate influence at the centre on behalf of the localities, and how were they repaid for it? How did officials appointed by the crown, including sheriffs and JPs, react to having to impose unpopular burdens, such as purveyance, upon the counties?

This book investigates how the rulers of the Habsburg world empire developed and implemented a central maritime policy for the Netherlands and appointed an admiral of the sea or admiral-general for that purpose. It also explains why the Habsburgs were eventually unable to gain control of the maritime affairs of the Netherlands, in spite of the support of the powerful Burgundian Lords of Veere, who occupied the central position of admiral from 1491 to 1558. From their power base on the island of Walcheren in Zeeland, known as the key to the Netherlands at the time because of its central location between Holland, Flanders, Antwerp and the sea, they held an ideal vantage point for exercising the admiralship. The result not only offers an illuminating insight into the organisation of the war fleet, maritime trade and fishery, privateering and prize law in the Habsburg Netherlands, but also puts the success of the later Dutch Republic in a new perspective.

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.

This book is a new survey of the Celtic and Roman traditions in Merovingian Gaul, Lombard Italy, and the British Isles from 590-768. In it Corning argues that the main areas of conflict between the two traditions during this period were the Easter controversy and by extension the style of tonsure. Corning's work serves as a valuable case study of the ways in which the early medieval Church attempted to reach consensus on divisive issues.

"Women in England in the Middle Ages" looks at 'all sorts and conditions' of women from c.500 to c.1500 A.D., concentrating on common experiences over their life-cycle, as daughters, wives and mothers, and the contrasts derived from their position in the social hierarchy. Most women lived out their lives in their own village or town, but queens and noblewomen exercised power and patronage locally and at the royal court. Religion played a significant part in women's lives; some became nuns and abbesses, while the majority were involved in their own parish and community. Inevitably, women's lives changed over time, but, in bringing up their children and balancing family and work, medieval women faced many of the problems of their modern counterparts.

Fresh approaches to one of the most important poems from medieval Scotland. John Barbour's Bruce, an account of the deeds of Robert I of Scotland (1306-29) and his companions during the so-called wars of independence between England and Scotland, is an important and complicated text. Composed c.1375 during the reign of Robert's grandson, Robert II, the first Stewart king of Scotland (1371-90), the poem represents the earliest surviving complete literary work of any length produced in "Inglis" in late medieval Scotland, andis usually regarded as the starting point for any worthwhile discussion of the language and literature of Early Scots. It has also been used as an essential "historical" source for the career and character of that iconic monarch Robert I. But its narrative defies easy categorisation, and has been variously interpreted as a romance, a verse history, an epic or a chivalric biography. This collection re-assesses the form and purpose of Barbour's great poem. It considers the poem from a variety of perspectives, re-examining the literary, historical, cultural and intellectual contexts in which it was produced, and offering important new insights. Steve Boardman is a Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh. Susan Foran, currently an independent scholar, researches chivalry, war and the idea of nation in late medieval historical writing. Contributors: Steve Boardman, Dauvit Broun, Michael Brown, Susan Foran, Chris Given-Wilson, Theo van Heijnsbergen, Rhiannon Purdie, Bioern Tjallen, Diana B. Tyson, Emily Wingfield.

Winner of the American Historical Association Marraro Prize, 1988. The Mountains and the City is a rare discussion in English of the history of a region of Europe, a genre common in other countries but undeveloped in Britain. The book deals with two mountain valleys in Tuscany from the eight to the twelfth century, with some examination of their future progress into the sixteenth. It charts their internal social and economic development and their links with the emerging world of the Italian city states. The importance of the book is in its stress on the small-scale society of the mountains; on the relation of local society to its geographical environment; and, above all, in its concern to see society from below, through the activities of local people, rather than through the interests of their masters. In its focus on local interaction, this is one of the few anthropological studies of medieval history that has yet been written.