On 15 July 1099 the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem beginning an innovative and prosperous Frankish rule over the city, which lasted a little over a hundred years and ended with the Khwarizmian conquest in 1244. This time of Crusader rule can be considered one of the most important in the history of Jerusalem. Through systematic renovation and repopulation, the Crusaders transformed a provincial town into the capital city of an eponymous kingdom: the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Adrian Boas's combined use of historical and archaeological evidence together with first-hand accounts written by visiting pilgrims results in a multi-faceted perspective of Crusader Jerusalem. This book will serve both as a scholarly account of this city's archaeology and a useful guide for the interested reader to a city at the centre of international and religious interest and conflict today.

Between Medieval Men argues for the importance of synoptically examining the whole range of same-sex relations in the Anglo-Saxon period, revisiting well-known texts and issues (as well as material often considered marginal) from a radically different perspective. The introductory chapters first lay out the premises underlying the book and its critical context, then emphasise the need to avoid modern cultural assumptions about both male-female and male-male relationships, and underline the paramount place of homosocial bonds in Old English literature. Part II then investigates the construction of and attitudes to same-sex acts and identities in ethnographic, penitential, and theological texts, ranging widely throughout the Old English corpus and drawing on Classical, Medieval Latin, and Old Norse material. Part III expands the focus to homosocial bonds in Old English literature in order to explore the range of associations for same-sex intimacy and their representation in literary texts such as Genesis A, Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, and AElfric's Lives of Saints.
During the course of the book's argument, David Clark uncovers several under-researched issues and suggests fruitful approaches for their investigation. He concludes that, in omitting to ask certain questions of Anglo-Saxon material, in being too willing to accept the status quo indicated by the extant corpus, in uncritically importing invisible (because normative) heterosexist assumptions in our reading, we risk misrepresenting the diversity and complexity that a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and sexuality suggests may be more genuinely characteristic of the period.

The third edition of The Beast Within has been updated throughout to include current scholarship, new discussion of definitions, and fresh perspectives on critical animal theory that places animals, rather than humans, at the center of the discourse. Organized thematically, Salisbury incorporates many new sections and subsections to reveal the multifaceted history of the relationship between humans and animals: domestication, animal diseases and pandemics, dogfights, cockfights, Islamic dietary restrictions, menageries and zoos, and animals as entertainers. To show how modern concerns have been informed by medieval precedents, sections have been expanded to uncover medieval understandings of animal sexuality, animals before the law, and vegetarianism and modern 'fake meat'. The logical narrative concludes with chapters on 'Animals as Humans' and 'Humans as Animals', demonstrating that the lines between humans and animals have become increasingly blurred from the fourth to the twenty-first century. With an interdisciplinary approach that discusses humans and animals in relation to domestication, symbolism, science, law, religion, food and diet, sexuality, and entertainment, The Beast Within is an essential resource for all students of animal history, literature, and art in the Middle Ages.

A study of the involvement of the Cistercian Order in the events surrounding the outbreak of heresy - particularly that of the Cathars and the resulting Albigensian Crusade - in southern France. Led by the example of Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian monks turned their attention to the world outside the monastery walls in response to the threat posed by heretical Christians, in particular the Cathars. The white monks, withother intellectuals, turned to pen, pulpit and popular preaching to counteract heresy, some accepting posts as bishops and papal legates, helping and even directing the Albigensian crusade, and contributing to the formulation ofprocedures for inquisition. Kienzle examines this important but little-studied aspect of Cistercian history to discover how and why the Order undertook endeavours that drew the monks outside their monastic vocation. The analysis of texts about the preaching campaigns and their contexts illuminate the ways in which medieval monastic authors perceived heresy, preached, and wrote against it. Professor BEVERLY MAYNE KIENZLE teaches at Harvard Divinity School.

Christians in fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazira were socially and culturally home in the Middle East, practicing their distinctive religion despite political instability. This insightful book challenges the normative Eurocentrism of scholarship on Christianity and the Islamic exceptionalism of much Middle Eastern history to reveal the often unexpected ways in which inter-religious interactions were peaceful or violent in this region. The multifaceted communal self-concept of the 'Church of the East' (so-called 'Nestorians') reveals cultural integration, with certain distinctive features. The process of patriarchal succession clearly borrowed ideas from surrounding Christian and Muslim groups, while public rituals and communal history reveal specifically Christian responses to concerns shared with Muslim neighbors. Drawing on sources from various languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Syriac, this book opens new possibilities for understanding the rich, diverse, and fascinating society and culture that existed in Iraq during this time.

This book is a thematic introductory survey accompanied by a rich selection of written and visual primary sources, which brings the experiences of medieval Jewish women to life for students. Including twenty primary source texts in translation relevant for the study of Jewish women including crusade chronicles, legal codes, economic contracts, marriage contracts, letters, and selections of works composed to guide women's spiritual lives and prayers. These documents provide documents for lectures to use in their seminars and students with a range if sources on which to see how the history of these women has been interpreted. This book explores how medieval Jewish women maneuvered within social norms governed by gender, religious identity, class, and place of residence, and emphasizes the ways in which Jewish women both resembled and differed from their local non-Jewish counterparts, providing students with an encompassing look at Jewish medieval women.

This is no conventional dictionary. For two centuries an extensive Jewish community played an important role in English history. The book opens up a society for which we have sources 'many hundreds of times richer than those for France' (Robert Chazan). Nearly 30 self-governing communities extended across the country, from York to Exeter, Hereford to Canterbury. 42 illustrations include 14 town plans. Vestiges of the medieval Jewry remain in street names; sites of Jewish houses, synagogues and cemeteries; and archaeological sites and artefacts. 30 biographic entries examine leading members of communities; 8 family trees show that in six cases they extended over at least five generations. A wide range of entries of general interest provide details on matters as diverse as synagogues, ritual child murder, women, libraries and books, mikva'ot, Usury, herb gardens, bezant, community, treasure and laving stone. 139

As the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm remain, to a considerable extent, obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, this volume approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, allowing overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity to be detected and defined - and thereby challenging the notion that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities - or 'hydrarchies'. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to a number of distinct regional case studies. The parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment. Monarchs and Hydrarchs will appeal to both students and specialists of the Viking Age, whilst serving as an equally valuable resource to those investigating early medieval Francia, Scandinavia, and the North Sea world as a whole.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Clerics in the Middle Ages" were subjected to differing ideals of masculinity, both from within the Church and from lay society. The historians in this volume interrogate the meaning of masculine identity for the medieval clergy, by considering a wide range of sources, time periods and geographical contexts.

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch. There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as keeping alive the works of Plato and Aristotle. When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad's great library, The House of Wisdom, housed "four hundred thousand." Jonathan Lyons shows just how much "Western" ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.

Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, hungry for knowledge, traveled East and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. In this brilliant, evocative book Jonathan Lyons reveals the story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.

Early Modern Italy is a fascinating survey of society in Italy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries - the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Covering the whole of the Peninsula from the Venetian Republic, to Florence, through to Naples it shows how the huge economic, cultural and social divides of the period still affect the stability of present day united Italy.
This is an essential guide to one of the most vibrant yet tempestuous periods of Italian history.

These fifteen essays range from Peter Abelard to John Wyclif. Beryl Smalley brings these men to life, uncovering what they read and what they thought and putting them into their historical context.

This thought-provoking book explores medieval perceptions of pilgrimage, gender and space. It examines real life evidence for the widespread presence of women pilgrims, as well as secular and literary texts concerning pilgrimage and women pilgrims represented in the visual arts. Women pilgrims were inextricably linked with sexuality and their presence on the pilgrimage trails was viewed as tainting sacred space.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203463803

Born amid immense bloodshed and suffering, the Kingdom of Jerusalem remained a battlefield for almost 200 years. The long rivalry between Christianity and Islam led to the Crusades and gave rise to the Military Orders of the Templars and Hospitallers, and provided a backdrop to the careers of some of history's most famous leaders, including Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. This book shows how the savagery of the Crusaders often left their opponents reeling, creating frictions that survived more than 700 years. At the same time, as the book illustrates, art, architecture, and learning all benefited from new knowledge the Crusaders brought back from the East.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Hono sapiens, homo pugnans, and so it has been since the beginning of recorded history. In the Middle Ages, especially, armed conflict and the military life were so much a part of the political and cultural development that a general account of this period is, in large measure, a description of how men went to war.

From the Arthurian epic poem Parzival to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the Assassin's Creed video game series, the Knights Templar have captivated artists and audiences alike for centuries. In modern times, the Templars have featured in many narrative contexts, evolving in a range of contrasting story roles: the grail guardian, the heroic knight, the villainous knight, and the keeper of conspiracies. This study explores why these gone but not forgotten warrior monks remain prominent in popular culture, how history influenced the myth, and how the myth has influenced literature, film and video games.

Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness. Compared to the glittering empires of Byzantium or Islam, the splintered kingdoms on the edge of the Atlantic appeared impoverished, fearful and backward. But the anarchy of these years proved to be, not the portents of the end of the world, as many Christians had dreaded, but rather the birthpangs of a radically new order. MILLENNIUM is a stunning panoramic account of the two centuries on either side of the apocalyptic year 1000. This was the age of Canute, William the Conqueror and Pope Gregory VII, of Vikings, monks and serfs, of the earliest castles and the invention of knighthood, and of the primal conflict between church and state. The story of how the distinctive culture of Europe - restless, creative and dynamic - was forged from out of the convulsions of these extraordinary times is as fascinating and as momentous as any in history.

In "Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture," Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson's physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople's interactions with other devotional media--such as books and art objects--may also have functioned like performance events. By revealing the remarkable resonance between cognitive science and medieval visual theories, Stevenson demonstrates how understanding medieval culture can enrich the study of performance generally. She concludes by applying her theories of medieval performance culture to contemporary religious forms, including creationist museums, Hell Houses, and megachurches.

This work offers a comprehensive study of warfare and the Byzantine army in the social context. It deals with Byzantine attitudes to warfare, the effects of war on society as a whole both culturally and physically, as well as relationships between soldiers, leaders and society. It also examines the strategic situation of the empire and the state's response to external military pressures in the period from the late 6th-century to the late 12th-century. The strategic geography of the empire, communications, logistics, resources and manpower are also examined, as well as the army's strategic and tactical administrative evolution.

Few historians have had a greater impact on their chosen period than K.B. McFarlane. This complete collection of the articles that he published during his lifetime represents the core of his work.