This is an innovative analysis of the relationship between women's economic opportunity and marriage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is based on an intensive study of York and Yorkshire, but also utilizes evidence from other parts of England and continental Europe. P. J. P. Goldberg explores the role of women in the economy and the part that marriage played in their lives. Importantly, he challenges the Wrigley and Schofield thesis of nuptiality: his analysis of the demography of marriage demonstrates that in late medieval Yorkshire, women participated strongly in the labour force, deferring marriage or avoiding it entirely. This is a stimulating and intelligent book, which makes an important contribution to our understanding of medieval ways of life.

All divisions of history into periods are artificial in proportion as they are precise. In history there is, strictly speaking, no end and no beginning. Each event is the product of an infinite series of causes, the starting-point of an infinite series of effects. Language and thought, government and manners, transform themselves by imperceptible degrees; with the result that every age is an age of transition, not fully intelligible unless regarded as the child of a past and the parent of a future. Even so the species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms shade off one into another until, if we only observe the marginal cases, we are inclined to doubt whether the species is more than a figment of the mind. Yet the biologist is prepared to defend the idea of species; and in like manner the historian holds that the distinction between one phase of culture and another is real enough to justify, and, indeed, to demand, the use of distingui-shing names.

In this collection of essays Robin Frame concentrates upon two main themes: the place of the Lordship of Ireland within the Plantagenet state; and the interaction of settler society and English government in the culturally hybrid frontier world of later medieval Ireland itself. As a preludeto both these themes, Ireland and Britain, 1170-1450 begins with a hitherto unpublished discussion of why 'the first English conquest of Ireland' has been viewed as a failure, and has rarely received the attention it deserves.
The first group of essays addresses such topics as the changing character of the aristocratic networks that bound Ireland to britain; the impact of the Scottish invasion led by Edward and Robert Bruce in the early fourteenth centruy; the identity of the 'English' political community that emerged in Ireland by the reign of Edward III; and the case for a broadly conceived British history, incorporating rather than excluding the English of Ireland. The subsequent group explore the character of Irish warfare, the adaptation of English institutions to a marcher environment; the exercise of power by regional magnates; and the complex practical interactions between royal government and Gaelic Irish Leaders.

Essays offer a lively snapshot of important topics. The essays presented here draw on a number of different approaches and perspectives to address and illuminate key aspects and issues of the period. Longitudinal studies of king's confessors and corrodies of the crown provide insights into the intersection of political, religious and demographic currents over the longue duree, and are complemented by studies of documentary sources of various kinds - newsletters, chronicles, and municipal archives - to challenge current understandings of important events and processes such as the deposition of Edward II, the evolving identity of the parliamentary peers, and Richard II's vision for the house of Lancaster. Prosopographical and biographical studies of post-plague clerics, and of knights within comital affinities and within their own individual affinity groups, shed light on county communities and gentry society; they also demonstrate the impact of the Black Death on society at large, especially on the question of religious continuity and discontinuity at the parish level. Contributors: Paul Dryburgh, Pierre Gaite, Chris Given-Wilson, Michael Jones, Taylor Kniphfer, Samuel Lane, Jonathan Mackman, Alison McHardy, Matt Raven, David Robinson.

Settled for many thousands of years by Native Americans, who had developed extensive, varied and long-lasting cultures across the continent, North America's economic development on the eve of the European invasions was not hugely dissimilar to that of the European settlers themselves. 

Francis Oakley continues his magisterial three-part history of the emergence of Western political thought during the Middle Ages with this second volume in the series. Here, Oakley explores kingship from the tenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, showing how, under the stresses of religious and cultural development, kingship became an inceasingly secular institution. "A masterpiece and the central part of a trilogy that will be a true masterwork."-Jeffrey Burton Russell, University of California, Santa Barbara

A biography of the 15th century Prince of Romania, Vlad Dracula, on whom Stoker based his fictional character. It covers his career as ruler of Wallachia, terrorizer of Transylvania and crusader against the Turks, and examines how closely he compares to his fictional counterpart. This biography shows "Vlad the Impaler" to be a man as extraordinary in his political and crusading abilities as he was in his evil. He was considered a hero by the Pope and by Romanians whom he liberated from the Turks, and generations of Russian Turks studied accounts of his political genius and used his regime as a model for their own. Yet Vlad is remembered first for his crimes, excessive in both nature and number. He kept a vastly superior Turkish force from attacking his capital by constructing an infamous "forest of the impaled". Only in the context of his times - times of plague, of the beginning of the Renaissance, of literally cut-throat politics and conflict between East and West - can one understand fully the many faces of Dracula. In this book the authors offer a view of Dracula and his influential era.

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal.The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.

Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

The author of the present volume aims to investigate the relationships between Romanians and nomadic Turkic groups (Pechenegs, Uzes, Cumans) in the southern half of Moldavia, north of the Danube Delta, between the tenth century and the great Mongol invasion of 1241-1242. The Carpathian-Danubian area particularly favoured the development of sedentary life, throughout the millennia, but, at various times, nomadic pastoralists of the steppes also found this area favourable to their own way of life. Due to the basic features of its landscape, the above-mentioned area, which includes a vast plain, became the main political stage of the Romanian ethnic space, a stage on which local communities had to cope with the pressures of successive intrusions of nomadic Turks, attracted by the rich pastures north of the Lower Danube. Contacts of the Romanians and of the Turkic nomads with Byzantium, Kievan Rus', Bulgaria and Hungary are also investigated. The conclusions of the volume are based on an analysis of both written sources (narrative, diplomatic, cartographic) and archaeological finds.

As the meeting point between Europe, colonial America, and Africa, the history of the Atlantic world is a constantly shifting arena, but one which has been a focus of huge and vibrant debate for many years. In over thirty chapters, all written by experts in the field, The Atlantic World takes up these debates and gathers together key, original scholarship to provide an authoritative survey of this increasingly popular area of world history. The book takes a thematic approach to topics including exploration, migration and cultural encounters. In the first chapters, scholars examine the interactions between groups which converged in the Atlantic world, such as slaves, European migrants and Native Americans. The volume then considers questions such as finance, money and commerce in the Atlantic world, as well as warfare, government and religion. The collection closes with chapters examining how ideas circulated across and around the Atlantic and beyond. It presents the Atlantic as a shared space in which commodities and ideas were exchanged and traded, and examines the impact that these exchanges had on both people and places. Including an introductory essay from the editors which defines the field, and lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings and maps this accessible volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of this broad sweep of world history.

Eating and drinking are essential to life and therefore of great interest to the historian. As well as having a real fascination in their own right, both activities are an integral part of the both social and economic history. Yet food and drink, especially in the middle ages, have received less than their proper share of attention. The essays in this volume approach their subject from a variety of angles: from the reality of starvation and the reliance on 'fast food' of those without cooking facilities, to the consumption of an English lady's household and the career of a cook in the French royal household.

In the mid-ninth century, Francia was rocked by the first royal divorce scandal of the Middle Ages: the attempt by King Lothar II of Lotharingia to rid himself of his queen, Theutberga and remarry. Even 'women in their weaving sheds' were allegedly gossiping about the lurid accusations made. Kings and bishops from neighbouring kingdoms, and several popes, were gradually drawn into a crisis affecting the fate of an entire kingdom. This is the first professionally published translation of a key source for this extraordinary episode: Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims's De divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae. This text offers eye-opening insight both on the political wrangling of the time and on early medieval attitudes towards magic, penance, gender, the ordeal, marriage, sodomy, the role of bishops, and kingship.The translation includes a substantial introduction and annotations, putting the case into its early medieval context and explaining Hincmar's sometimes-dubious methods of argument. -- .

Bodzia is one of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the post-war period in Poland. It is one of the few cemeteries in Poland from the time of the origins of the Polish state. The unique character of this discovery is mainly due to the fact that a small, elite population was buried there. The burials there included people whose origins were connected with the Slavic, Nomadic-Khazarian and Scandinavian milieus. For the first time the evidence from this area is given prominence. This book is designed mainly for readers outside Poland. The reader is offered a collection of chapters, combining analyses and syntheses of the source material, and a discussion of its etno-cultural and political significance. The authors formulate new hypotheses and ideas, which put the discoveries in a broader European context. Contributors are Wieslaw Bogdanowicz, Mateusz Bogucki, Andrzej Buko, Magdalena M. Bus, Maria Dekowna, Alicja Drozd-Lipinska, Wladyslaw Duczko, Karin Margarita Frei, Tomasz Goslar, Tomasz Grzybowski, Zdzislaw Hensel, Iwona Hildebrandt-Radke, Michal Kara, Joanna Koszalka, Anna B. Kowalska, Tomasz Kozlowski, Marek Krapiec, Roman Michalowski, Michael Muller-Wille, T. Douglas Price, Tomasz Purowski, Tomasz Sawicki, Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Stanislaw Suchodolski and Kinga Zamelska-Monczak.

This collection of essays by European and American scholars addresses the changing nature and appeal of crusading during the period which extended from the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 to the battle of Mohacs in 1526. Contributors focus on two key aspects of the subject. One is developments in the crusading message and the language in which it was framed. These were brought about partly by the appearance of new enemies, above all the Ottoman Turks, and partly by shifting religious values and innovative currents of thought within Catholic Europe. The other aspect is the wide range of responses which the papacy's repeated calls to holy war encountered in a Christian community which was increasingly heterogeneous in character. This collection represents a substantial contribution to the study of the Later Crusades and of Renaissance Europe.

This two-volume work, Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies sheds new light on an under-investigated phenomenon of European medieval intellectual history: the transmission of knowledge and texts from Latin into Hebrew between the twelfth and the fifteenth century. Volume One: Studies, offers 18 studies and Volume Two: Texts in Contexts, includes editions and analyses of hitherto unpublished texts of medieval Latin-into-Hebrew translations. Both volumes are available separately or together as a set.

This book is about the ways that ordinary people in town and country creatively define themselves, their families and their social networks. It explores, for the period c. 1450-1560, inheritance strategies, personal possessions and their meanings, attitudes to commemoration after death, the daily fashioning of identity and the interactions between imagination and daily life. The book is also about how the surviving textual evidence may be used to reconstruct these perceptions and experiences and the implications of such reconstruction for cultural history in the current crises of interpretation. Above all, this book emphasizes the cultural significance of the creative imagination.

While focusing on the relationship between the papacy and the 14th-century crusades, this study also illuminates other fields of activity in Avignon, such as papal taxation and interaction with Byzantium. Using recent research, Housley covers all areas where crusading occurred--including the eastern Mediterranean, Spain, eastern Europe, and Italy--and analyzes the Curia's approach to related issues such as peacemaking between warring Christian powers, the work of Military Orders, and western attempts to maintain a trade embargo on Mamluk, Egypt. Placing the papal policies of Avignon firmly in context, the author demonstrates that the period witnessed the relentless erosion of papal control over the crusades.

"The leading academic vehicle for scholarly publication in the field of medieval warfare." Medieval Warfare The essays in this volume of the Journal continue its proud tradition of presenting cutting-edge research with a wide chronological and geographical range, from eleventh-century Georgia (David IV's use of the methods described in De velitatione bellica) to fifteenth-century England and France (a detailed analysis of the use of the under-appreciated lancegay and similar weapons). Iberia and the Empire are also addressed, with a study of Aragonese leaders in the War of the Two Pedros, a discussion of Prince Ferdinand's battle-seeking strategy prior to the battle of Toro in 1476, and an analysis and transcription of a newly-discovered Habsburg battle plan of the early sixteenth century, drawn up for the war against Venice. The volume also embraces different approaches, from cultural-intellectual history (the afterlife of the medieval Christian Warrior), to experimental archaeology (the mechanics of raising trebuchets), to comparison of "the face of battle" in a medieval illuminated manuscript with its depiction in modern films, to archivally-based administrative history (recruitment among the sub-gentry for Edward I's armies). Contributors: David S. Bachrach, Daniel Bertrand, Peter Burkholder, Ekaitz Etxeberria Gallastegi, Michael John Harbinson, Steven Isaac, Donald J. Kagay, Tomaz Lazar, Mamuka Tsurtsumia

This book narrates the battles, conquests and diplomatic activities of the early Muslim fighters in Syria and Iraq vis-a-vis their Byzantine and Sasansian counterparts. It is the first English translation of one of the earliest Arabic sources on the early Muslim expansion entitled Futuh al-Sham (The Conquests of Syria). The translation is based on the Arabic original composed by a Muslim author, Muhammad al-Azdi, who died in the late 8th or early 9th century C.E. A scientific introduction to al-Azdi's work is also included, covering the life of the author, the textual tradition of the work as well as a short summary of the text's train of thought. The source narrates the major historical events during the early Muslim conquests in a region that covers today's Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iraq in the 7th century C.E. Among these events are the major battles against the Byzantines, such as the Battles of Ajnadayn and al-Yarmuk, the conquests of important cities, including Damascus, Jerusalem and Caesarea, and the diplomatic initiatives between the Byzantines and the early Muslims. The narrative abounds with history and Islamic theological content. As the first translation into a European language, this volume will be of interest to a wide range of readership, including (Muslim and Christian) theologians, historians, Islamicists, Byzantinists, Syrologists and (Arabic) linguists.

Medieval Londoners were a diverse group, some born in the city, and others drawn to the capital from across the realm and from overseas. For some, London became the sole focus of their lives, while others retained or developed networks and loyalties that spread far and wide. The rich evidence for the medieval city, including archaeological and documentary evidence, means that the study of London and its inhabitants remains a vibrant field. Medieval Londoners brings together archaeologists, historians, art-historians and literary scholars whose essays provide glimpses of medieval Londoners in all their variety. This volume is offered to Caroline M. Barron, Emeritus Professor of the History of London at Royal Holloway, University of London, on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Her remarkable career - over some fifty years - has revitalized the way in which we consider London and its people. This volume is a tribute to her scholarship and her friendship and encouragement to others. It is thanks to Caroline M. Barron that the study of medieval London remains as vibrant today as it has ever been.