A comprehensive study into the history of Hagia Sophia with particular focus on the current and last century, providing a solid groundwork for researchers and students alike / By studying a variety of perspectives, this book is able to provide a detailed overview of the historical, political, religious, cultural, and social debates surrounding Hagia Sofia / Flashpoint Hagia Sophia discusses the current perspectives surrounding the site and their origins going back to its construction, which will appeal to those working in Archaeology, History, Politics, and International Relations

Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI were at the same time kings of England and dukes of Lancaster. This book examines the complex relationship between their public authority and their personal lordship over a private inheritance. In so doing, it sheds new light on late medieval English government at both national and local levels.

The medieval film genre is not, in general, concerned with constructing a historically accurate past, but much analysis nonetheless centers on highlighting anachronisms. This book aims to help scholars and aficionados of medieval film think about how the re-creation of an often mythical past performs important cultural work for modern directors and viewers. The essays in this collection demonstrate that directors intentionally insert modern preoccupations into a setting that would normally be considered incompatible with these concepts. The Middle Ages provide an imaginary space far enough removed from the present day to explore modern preoccupations with human identity.

Completely updated to include important primary research, archaeological findings and debates from the last decade, this third edition of F. Donald Logan's successful book examines the Vikings and their critical role in history.

The author uses archaeological, literary and historical evidence to analyze the Vikings' overseas expeditions and their transformation from raiders to settlers. Focusing on the period from 800-1050, it studies the Vikings across the world, from Denmark and Sweden right across to the British Isles, the North Atlantic and the New World.

This edition includes:

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• a new epilogue explaining the aims of the book
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• updated further reading sections
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• maps and photographs.

By taking this new archaeological and primary research into account, the author provides a vital text for history students and researchers of this fascinating people.

A major new biography of the Black Prince. 'A clear-eyed and thrilling vision of the man behind the legend' DAN JONES. 'Pacy, vivid and extremely readable' TLS. In 1346, at the age of sixteen, he won his spurs at Crecy; nine years later he conducted a brutal raid across Languedoc; in 1356 he captured the king of France at Poitiers; as lord of Aquitaine he ruled a vast swathe of southwestern France. He was Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III, but better known to posterity as 'the Black Prince'. Michael Jones tells the remarkable story of a great warrior-prince - and paints an unforgettable portrait of warfare and chivalry in the late Middle Ages.

This is an exploration of how the legend of Thor has been adopted, adapted and transformed through history. The myths of the Norse god Thor were preserved in the "Icelandic Eddas", set down in the early Middle Ages. The bane of giants and trolls, Thor was worshipped as the last line of defence against all that threatened early Nordic society. Thor's significance persisted long after the Christian conversion and, in the mid-eighteenth century, Thor resumed a symbolic prominence among northern countries. Admired and adopted in Scandinavia and Germany, he became central to the rhetoric of national romanticism and to more belligerent assertions of nationalism. Resurrected in the latter part of the twentieth century in "Marvel Magazine", Thor was further transformed into an articulation both of an anxious male sexuality and of a parallel nervousness regarding American foreign policy. Martin Arnold explores the extraordinary regard in which Thor has been held since medieval times and considers why and how his myth has been adopted, adapted and transformed.

Intellectually and visually stimulating, this important landmark book looks at the religious, political, social and artistic significance of the Imperial tombs of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). It traces the evolutionary development of the most elaborately beautiful imperial tombs to examine fundamental issues on death and the afterlife in one of the world's most sophisticated civilizations. Selected tombs are presented in terms of their structure, artistic programs and their purposes. The author sets the tombs in the context of Chinese attitudes towards the afterlife, the politics of mausoleum architecture, and the artistic vocabulary which was becoming the mainstream of Chinese civilization.

Essays into numerous aspects of the Domesday Book, shedding fresh light on its mysteries. Compiled from the records of a survey of the kingdom of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, Domesday Book is a key source for the history of England. However, there has never been a critical edition of the textand so, despite over 200 years of intense academic study, its evidence has rarely been exploited to the full. The essays in this volume seek to realize the potential of Domesday Book by focussing on the manuscript itself. There are analyses of abbreviations, letter forms, and language; re-assessments of key sources, the role of tenants-in-chief in producing them, and the nature of the Norman settlement that their forms illuminate; a re-evaluation of the data and its referents; and finally, fresh examinations of the afterlife of the Domesday text and how it was subsequently perceived. In identifying new categories of evidence and revisiting old ones, these studies point to a better understanding of the text. There are surprising insights into its sources and developing programme and, intriguingly, a system of encoding hitherto unsuspected. In its turn the import of its data becomes clearer, thereby shedding new light on Anglo-Norman society and governance. It is in these terms that this volume offers a departure in Domesday studies and looks forward to the resolution of long-standing problems that have hitherto bedevilled the interpretation of an iconic text. David Roffe and K.S.B. Keats-Rohan are leading Domesday scholars who have published widely on Domesday Book and related matters. Contributors: Howard B. Clarke, Sally Harvey, K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, Andrew Lowerre, John Palmer, David Roffe, Ian Taylor, Pamela Taylor, Frank Thorn, Ann Williams.

In this new edition of A Short History of the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein offers a panoramic view of the medieval world from Iceland to China and from Sweden to West Africa. Yet the book never loses sight of the main contours of the period (c.300 to c.1500) or of the fate of the heirs of the Roman Empire. Its lively and informative narrative covers the major events, political and religious movements, men and women, saints and sinners, economic and cultural changes, ideals, fears, and fantasies of the period in Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. A comprehensive new map program, updated for the global reach of this edition, offers a way to visualize the era's enormous political, economic, and religious changes. Line drawings make clear archaeological finds and architectural structures All of the maps, genealogies, and figures in the book, as well as practice questions and suggested answers, are available at utphistorymatters.com,

Music theorists labelled the musical art of the 1330s and 1340s as 'new' and 'modern'. A close reading of writings on music theory and the polyphonic repertory from the first half of the fourteenth century reveals a modern musical art that arose due to specific innovations in music notation. The French ars nova employed as its theoretical fundament a new system for arranging musical time proposed by the astronomer and mathematician Jean des Murs. Challenging prevailing accounts of the ars nova, this book presents the 'new art' within the intellectual context of its time, revises the datings of Jean des Murs's writings on music theory, and presents the intersection of theory and practice for a crucial era in the history of music. Through contemporaneous accounts, Desmond explores how individuals were involved in 'changing' music in early fourteenth-century France, and the technical developments they pursued that precipitated this stylistic change.

"Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media" contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.

This new volume in the Routledge Medieval Casebooks series explores medieval rhetorical practices. Ten original essays examine the ways in which contemporary readers and scholars might employ rhetorical theory to illuminate underlying meanings in medieval texts. The contributors also explore how rhetoric was used as a means of textual innovation in the work of medieval authors such as Chaucer and his contemporaries.

Fruits of the most recent research on the worlds of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The essays collected here embody the Haskins Society's commitment to historical and interdisciplinary research on the early and central Middle Ages, especially in the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin worlds, but also on thecontinent. Their topics range from the discovery of Bede's use of catechesis to educate readers on conversion, the discovery of an early eleventh-century Viking mass burial, and historical interpretations of Eadric Streona, to the development of monastic liturgy at Durham Cathedral, the Franco-centricity of Latin accounts of the First Crusade, and an investigation of Gerald of Wales' rarely considered Speculum duorum virorum. Contributions on the charters of the countesses of Ponthieu and Blanche of Navarre's role in military dimensions of governance explore the nature and mechanisms of female lordship on the continent, while others investigate the nature of kingship through close readings, respectively, of John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury and the Vie de Saint Gilles; a further chapter considers the changing image of William the Conqueror in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French historiography. Finally, a study of Serlo of Bayeux's defense of clerical marriage, along with a critical edition and facing translation of his poem The Capture of Bayeux offers readers new insights and access tothis often overlooked witness to Norman history in the early twelfth century. Contributors: Angela Boyle, Marcus Bull, Philippa Byrne, Jay Paul Gates, Veronique Gazeau, Wendy Marie Hoofnagle, Elizabeth van Houts, Kathy M. Krause, Charlie Rozier, Katrin E. Sjursen, Carolyn Twomey, Emily A. Winkler

This study of crusading policy examines the relationship between the papacy and 'internal' crusades of Europe during the early 13th century. An 'internal' crusade is defined as a holy war authorized by the pope and fought within Christian Europe against those perceived to be foes of Christendom, either to recover property or in defence of the Church or Christians. This study is therefore not concerned with those crusades authorized against Muslim enemies in the East and Spain, nor with crusades authorized against pagans on the borders of Europe. Up to now these crusades have attracted relatively little attention in modern British scholarship.This in spite of their undoubted European-wide significance and an increasing recognition that the period 1198-1245 marks the beginning of a crucial change in papal policy underpinned by canon law. This book discusses the developments through analysis of the extensive source material drawn from unregistered papal letters, placing them firmly in the context of ecclesiastical legislation, canon law, chronicles and other supplementary evidence. It thereby seeks to contribute to our understanding of the complex politics, theology and rhetoric that underlay the papacy's call for crusades within Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century.

The rhetorical trope of irony is well-trod territory, with books and essays devoted to its use by a wide range of medieval and Renaissance writers, from the Beowulf-poet and Chaucer to Boccaccio and Shakespeare; however, the use of sarcasm, the "flesh tearing" form of irony, in the same literature has seldom been studied at length or in depth. Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to pick out in a written text, since it relies so much on tone of voice and context. This is the first book-length study of medieval and Renaissance sarcasm. Its fourteen essays treat instances in a range of genres, both sacred and secular, and of cultures from Anglo-Saxon to Arabic, where the combination of circumstance and word choice makes it absolutely clear that the speaker, whether a character or a narrator, is being sarcastic. Essays address, among other things, the clues writers give that sarcasm is at work, how it conforms to or deviates from contemporary rhetorical theories, what role it plays in building character or theme, and how sarcasm conforms to the Christian milieu of medieval Europe, and beyond to medieval Arabic literature. The collection thus illuminates a half-hidden but surprisingly common early literary technique for modern readers.

This book examines one of the most fundamental issues in twelfth-century English politics: justice. It demonstrates that during the foundational period for the common law, the question of judgement and judicial ethics was a topic of heated debate - a common problem with multiple different answers. How to be a judge, and how to judge well, was a concern shared by humble and high, keeping both kings and parish priests awake at night. Using theological texts, sermons, legal treatises and letter collections, the book explores how moralists attempted to provide guidance for uncertain judges. It argues that mercy was always the most difficult challenge for a judge, fitting uncomfortably within the law and of disputed value. Shining a new light on English legal history, Justice and mercy reveals the moral dilemmas created by the establishment of the common law. -- .

An illustrated overview of the Hundred Years War, the longest-running and the most significant conflict in western Europe in the later Middle Ages. There can be no doubt that military conflict between France and England dominated European history in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Hundred Years War is of considerable interest both because of its duration and the number of theatres in which it was fought. Drawing on the latest research for this new edition, Hundred Years War expert Professor Anne Curry examines how the war can reveal much about the changing nature of warfare: the rise of infantry and the demise of the knight; the impact of increased use of gunpowder and the effect of the war on generations of people. Updated and revised for the new edition, with full-colour maps and 50 new images, this illustrated introduction provides an important reference resource for the academic or student reader as well as those with a general interest in late medieval warfare.

This book traces the 800-year history of Byzantium. From the early uncertain years of the Empire, to the triumphal period when its wealth attracted Viking and Asian warriors to join its armies, and finally to the death of Byzantium's last emperor in 1453, the Empire's military history is laid bare.

First full-length study of Pope Gregory X in relation to Crusade, demonstrating his significant impact. Pope Gregory X stood at the very centre of the crusading movement in the later thirteenth century. An able diplomat, he showed himself adept at navigating the political waters of Europe and the Mediterranean World. His crusade gained the participation of virtually all of the leaders of Western Europe, and even the Byzantine emperor and the Ilkhan of the Mongols: crucial if his crusade were to have a chance of defeating the very formidable and successful Mamluk Sultan Baybars. However, Gregory's premature death put paid to his crusade plans. Perhaps because of this, Gregory has hitherto been somewhat neglected by historians - a gap which this book aims to fill. It provides a full account of his contribution to the Crusade, demonstrating that he left a lasting mark on how crusading would operate in the years to come. PHILIP BALDWIN eceived his doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London.

Over six hundred years before John Milton's Paradise Lost, Anglo-Saxon authors told their own version of the fall of the angels. This book brings together various cultural moments, literary genres and relevant comparanda to recover that version, from the legal and social world to the world of popular spiritual ritual and belief. The story of the fall of the angels in Anglo-Saxon England is the story of a successfully transmitted exegetical teaching turned rich literary tradition. It can be traced through a range of genres - sermons, saints' lives, royal charters, riddles, devotional and biblical poetry - each one offering a distinct window into the ancient myth's place within the Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural imagination. -- .

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection of essays by American, British, and Iberian scholars examines the literary, historical, and artistic exchanges between England and Iberia from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Ranging from analyses of royal marriages and political alliances to examinations of literary, artistic, and religious interactions, these essays demonstrate the importance of Anglo-Iberian relationships both in and of themselves and in the larger context of developments in Medieval Europe. They also suggest further avenues for research in an area of study that deserves greater scholarly attention. Scholars and students interested in England and Iberia or in comparative studies of Medieval Europe will want to read this book.