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Books > History > World history > 500 to 1500
This book traces the history and ecology of the Aymaras and the Quechuas: the highland peoples of the Central Andes, who formed the nucleus of the great Inca Empire which extended for two thousand miles along the Pacific coast to the fringes of the tropical interior. In twenty millennia the Indians of the Andes had had no cultural contacts with the Old World yet they had already passed independently through stages of development usually associated with the Neolithic Age and had achieved a degree of technical and artistic excellence. In four centuries of contact there has of course been appreciable acculturation and osmosis. Originally published in 1952.
First published to wide critical acclaim in 1992, "The Two Cities"
has become an essential text for students of medieval history. For
the second edition, the author has thoroughly revised each chapter,
bringing the material up to date and taking the historiography of
the past decade into account.
The grass-roots approach allows for a better understanding of religion as it shows how it encompassed all spheres of daily life. By exploring how pastoral care took shape at the local levels of society, the volume is useful in showing how the ideal of leading everybody to salvation was a central element of Carolingian culture. This will be useful for all students and scholars who are interested in the ecclesiastical history of Europe in the Carolingian period. The various sections on the roles of the priest, such as priests as experts, shows how well-educated local priests did not only know how to baptise and preach, but could also advise on matters concerning health, legal procedure and even the future, which provides a more detailed and nuanced view of the role of the priest in this period.
Providing an intellectual biography of Pope Pius II, this book offers an understanding of the formation of the concept of ‘European’ ensuring students studying the formation of modern Europe, intellectual history and the history of early modern political thought, and cultural studies have a better understanding of how this concept was formed and disseminated. This volume will be in demand for students of a wide range of topics because it will demonstrate to them how important it is to understand how and when this concept of ‘Europe’ and being ‘European was formed to better understand the later revolutions, slave trade, Empire building and wars. This book is authored by Nancy Bisaha who has expertise on Renaissance humanism and identity and has authored another book Pope Pius II. It contains close readings of his letters, orations, histories, autobiography, and other works.
This collection of essays, written by leading experts, showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought. Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known "political thinkers" who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock of thirty years of developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both celebrating and challenging the perspectives of a generation of scholars, notably Cary J. Nederman, it offers refreshing new assessments. The book re-introduces the history of western political thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the wider disciplines of History and Political Science. Recent historiographical debates have revolutionized discussion of whether or not there was an "Aristotelian revolution" in the thirteenth century. Thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua are read in new ways; less well-known texts, such as the Irish On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, offer new perspectives. Further, the collection argues that medieval political ideas contain important lessons for the study of concepts of contemporary interest such as toleration. The volume is an ideal resource for both students and scholars interested in medieval and Renaissance history as well as the history of political thought.
This is a fascinating story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the grandest noble families in medieval England set against the backdrop of Viking raids and the Norman Conquest of 1066. Among the most famous families in English history was that of the Earl Godwin of Wessex ,whose most famous son was King Harold. KEY TOPICS: This is the history of the powerful Godwin dynasty, from the mystery of their ancestral origins and background, to their rise to power under King Cnut, and their opportunism and accumulation of wealth under his successors. Frank Barlow charts the family through to Harold - the last Anglo-Saxon king - and finally the crowning of William the Conqueror during the Norman Conquest. It was a period of violent upheaval in English history with Viking attacks and the conquest of England by Danish kings. The author unravels the gripping history of a feuding family that nevertheless determined the course and fortunes of all the English. MARKET: For those interested in Medieval, British or Scandinavian history.
The western steppelands of Central Eurasia, stretching from the Danube, through the modern Ukraine and southern Russia, to the Caspian, have historically been the meeting ground of Inner Asian pastoral nomads and the agrarian societies of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. This volume deals, firstly, with the interaction of the nomads with their sedentary neighbours - the Kievan Rus' state and the medieval polities of Transcaucasia, Georgia in particular - in the period from the 6th century to the advent of the Mongols. Second, it looks at questions of nomadic ethnogenesis (Oghuz, Hungarian, Qipchaq), at the evolution of nomadic political traditions and the heritage of the Turk empire, and at aspects of indigenous nomadic religious traditions together with the impact of foreign religions on the nomads - notably the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. A number of articles focus on the Qipchaqs, a powerful confederation of complex Inner Asian origins that played a crucial role in the history of Christian Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia and the Muslim world between the 11th and 13th centuries.
Fully revised, updated and extended to include the momentous developments of 2020, this fourth edition of Peter Rietbergen's highly acclaimed Europe: A Cultural History is a major and original contribution to the study of Europe. The book examines the structures of culture in this part of Eurasia from the beginnings of human settlement on to the genesis of agricultural society, of greater polities, of urban systems, and the slow transitions that resulted in a (post-)industrial society and the individualistic mass culture of the present. Using both economic and socio-political analytical concepts, the volume outlines cultural continuity and change in Europe through the lenses of literature, the arts, science, technology and music, to show the continent's ever-changing identities. In a highly readable style, it expertly contextualizes such diverse and wide-ranging topics as Celtic society, the Roman legal system, the oppositions between 'elite' and 'popular' culture in pre-industrial Europe, Michelangelo's world-view, the interaction between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the growth of a society of time and money, the appeal of fascism and other totalitarian ideologies, and the ways the songs of Sting express late twentieth-century thinking. Structured both chronologically and thematically, the text is distinctive in the attention consistently paid to the many ways Europe has been formed through its contacts with non-European cultures, especially those of Asia and the Americas. This edition concludes with an epilogue that discusses the ways Europe's recent past - including the long-term efforts at further unification, and the various forms of opposition against it - has been both interpreted and misinterpreted; the importance of globalization; and the major challenges facing Europe in the present, amongst which are the consequences of the pandemic of 2020. With a wide selection of illustrations, maps, excerpts from primary sources and even lyrics from contemporary songs to support its arguments, the text remains the definitive cultural history of Europe for both the general reader and students of European history and culture.
Guild and State examines the values of social solidarity and fraternity that emerged from medieval guilds and city-communes, and the effect of traditional corporate organization of labor on socioeconomic attitudes and theories or the state. What ordinary guildsmen and townsmen thought about these issues can be gleaned from chronicles, charters, and reported slogans. But in tracing attitudes toward the guilds of early Germanic times to today's equivalent -- trade unions -- a distinction must be made between popular "ethos" and learned "philosophy." In Europe, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the corporate organization of labor and of town-market communities developed side-by-side with the ideals of personal liberty, market freedom, and legal equality. Both affected the ideology of the European commune and city-state in specific and discernible ways. Self-governing labor organizations and civil freedom developed together as coherent practices. The values of mutual aid and craft honor on the one hand, and of personal freedom and legal equality on the other, formed the moral infrastructure of our civilization. Alternate ideals balanced, harmonized, and even cross-fertilized one another -- as in the principle of freedom of association. Contrary to preconceptions, however, corporate values were seldom expressed philosophically in the Middle Ages. Political theory and the world of learning from the start emphasized liberal values. It was only after the Reformation that guild and communal values found expression in political theory. Even then only a few philosophers acknowledged that solidarity and exchange -- the poles around which the values of guild and civil society,respectively, rotate -- are not opposites but complementary, and attempted to weave these together into a texture as tough and complex as that of urban society itself. The Enlightenment and industrialization led to an apotheosis of liberal values. Guilds disappeared and were only in part replaced by labor unions; the values of market exchange have since been in the ascendant -- though Hegel, Durkheim, and more recently, advocates of liberal corporatism maintain the possibility of a symbiosis between corporate and liberal values. In Guild and State there emerges an alternative history of political thought, which will be fascinating to the general as well as the specialist reader.
This book explores social transformations which led to the establishment of medieval Hum (future Herzegovina) and Bosnia in the period from ca. 450 to 1200 AD using the available written and material sources. It follows social and political developments in these historical regions from the last centuries of Late Antiquity, through the social collapse of the seventh and eighth centuries, and into their new medieval beginnings in the ninth. Fragmentary and problematic sources from this period were, in the past, often used to justify modern political claims to these contested territories and incorporate them into the 'national biographies' of the Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), or to support the 'Yugoslavizing' and other ideological discourses. The book goes beyond ideological and national mythologemes of the past in order to provide a new historical narrative that brings more light to this region placed on the frontiers of both the medieval West and the Byzantine empire. It provides a new views of the period between ca. 450 and 1200 for the parts of Western Balkans and Eastern Adriatic, brings the most recent local historical and archaeological research to the Anglophone readership, and contributes to the scholarship of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean with study of very poorly known area. The book is intended for academic audience interested in history and archaeology of the Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages, but also to all those interested in general history of Herzegovina, Bosnia, Dalmatia and the Balkans.
At the time of its publication in 1923, Charles Homer Haskins' The Rise of Universities was considered remarkable for its erudition, succinctness, and balance. The historian Theodor Mommsen described it as "a work which has remained unsurpassed in the conciseness and vividness of its account." Eight decades after its appearance, it remains fresh and informative. It has not been surpassed, and is as invaluable as ever. Haskins traces the rise of the mediaeval university as one phase of the intellectual awakening in Europe in the late Middle Ages, in an effort to broaden our understanding of "the ancient and universal company of scholars." In the depth and breadth of its analysis, there is no better portrait of universities during their infancy in the Middle Ages. With great detail and precision, Haskins describes the university's curriculum, teaching, teachers, and students. Drawing deeply on his knowledge as one of the leading mediaeval scholars of his day, he provides an exceptionally vivid picture of student life of the time, through his analysis of their manuals, letters, and poetry. The Rise of Universities goes far beyond its central subject to offer a broad description of the social conditions in which universities took root and flourished. At the same time, one cannot read Haskins without seeing the influences of the mediaeval university on contemporary institutions of higher learning. The Rise of Universities reminds us that the university has not only been a crucible fostering intellectual inquiry and creativity, but continues after eight hundred years to be a center of teaching and learning. In his new introduction, Lionel S. Lewis develops Haskins' passing observationthat "the university of the twentieth century is the lineal descendant of mediaeval Paris and Bologna, " and considers the question of why universities came into being at the particular time in history when they did. The Rise of the Universities will be of interest to educators and students who wish to better understand the institutions in which they have lived, taught, and been taught.
This volume represents a major contribution to the history of the Northern Crusades and the Christianization of the Baltic lands in the Middle Ages, from the beginnings of the Catholic mission to the time of the Reformation. The subjects treated range from discussions of the ideology and practice of crusade and conversion, through studies of the motivation of the crusading countries (Denmark, Sweden and Germany) and the effects of the crusades on the countries of the eastern Baltic coast (Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Prussia and Lithuania), to analyses of the literature and historiography of the crusade. It brings together essays from both established and younger scholars from the western tradition with those from the modern Baltic countries and Russia, and presents in English some of the fruits of the first decade of historical scholarship and dialogue after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. The depth of treatment, diversity of approaches, and accompanying bibliography of publications make this collection a major resource for the teaching of the Baltic Crusades.
This book analyses the history of Naples and its relationship with its neighbours and will appeal to students of history and diplomatic history / By including the Latin text and English translations of these works, this book will appeal to those who wish to use these primary sources / This book will appeal to those interested in the history of the Church in Italy.
A Chronology of Medieval British History 1307-1485 is a year-by-year guide to political, military, religious and cultural developments in the states within the British Isles from 1307-1485. The book uses a range of primary sources to provide a detailed and comprehensive narrative of events as they occurred. Throughout, the dating and accuracy of the records are identified, and problems of interpretation highlighted. The result is both a narrative of developments in parallel and inter-connected polities, and an 'epitome' of source material. Where exact data is difficult to come by or problematic on account of the political bias of the sources, this is evaluated and various options in interpretation referenced along with any recent developments in study and interpretation by academic experts. Using a chronological framework and dividing the material into separate sections for each state or region each year to allow for easy cross-referencing, A Chronology of Medieval British History 1307-1485 is ideal for students of medieval British and European history. |
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