The Wendish Crusade of 1147, one of the Northern Crusades and a part of the Second Crusade, took place at a critical phase in the evolution of crusading rhetoric. The initiators and apologists of the campaign employed rhetorical devices to justify the occupation of a region and conversion of a population under the auspices of a crusade. A detailed examination of the primary sources shows that the justification of a crusade against apostates was not only a German endeavour, or the pope's will, but a political reality of the twelfth century. Therefore, the attitude of the papacy is shown to be reactive rather than proactive.

This monograph revisits one of the most debated aspects of Dionysian scholarship: the enigma of its authorship. To establish the identity of the author remains impossible. However, the legitimacy of the attribution of the corpus to Dionysius the Areopagite should not be seen as an intended forgery but rather as a masterfully managed literary device, which better indicates the initial intention of the actual author. The affiliation with Dionysius the Areopagite has metaphorical and literary significance. Dionysius is the only character in the New Testament who is unique in his conjunction between the apostle Paul and the Platonic Athenian Academy. In this regard this attribution, to the mind of the actual author of the corpus, could be a symbolic gesture to demonstrate the essential truth of both traditions as derived essentially from the same divine source. The importance of this assumption taken in its historical context highlights the culmination of the formation of the civilized Roman-Byzantine Christian identity.

The 5th edition of this classic book was originally published in 1955, and includes contributions from well-known authors on history, politics, literature, art, architecture and philosophy. The ideas are discussed and interpreted in the context of the development of European and global intellectual, cultural and political life and includes chapters on the German communist writers of the post-war years.

Originally published in 1957, this study shows what the various sections of the Germans of every rank and class were thinking of the ruling men, how far they supported or opposed them, what were their wishes, hopes and fears, prejudices, ideals and standards of right and wrong. The influence of foreign thought, and parallels with the development of other nations is also discussed. The diverse sources used for research for this volume include religious and legal writings, literature, broadsheets, verses of minstrels, folk-songs and later, newspapers.

Across 18 individually authored chapters, this volume offers fresh insight into how Italy was crucial to the East Roman world across the early and cenral Middle Ages. An interdiscplinary approach, incorporating historiography, archaeology, social, political, and economic history, this study provides a vast array of perspectives on the themes of empire, cities, and elites. With contributions from established and early career scholars, elucidating particular issues of scholarship as well as general historical developments, the volume provides both immediate contributions and opens space for a new generation of readers and scholars to a growing field.

Byzantine Childhood examines the intricacies of growing up in medieval Byzantium, children's everyday experiences, and their agency. By piecing together a wide range of sources and utilising several methodological approaches inspired by intersectionality, history from below and microhistory, it analyses the life course of Byzantine boys and girls and how medieval Byzantine society perceived and treated them according to societal and cultural expectations surrounding age, gender, and status. Ultimately, it seeks to reconstruct a more plausible picture of the everyday life of children, one of the most vulnerable social groups throughout history and often a neglected subject in scholarship. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book is necessary reading for scholars and students of Byzantine history, as well as those interested in the history of childhood and the family.

The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower reviews the most current scholarship on the late medieval poet and opens doors purposefully to research areas of the future. It is divided into three parts. The first part, "Working theories: medieval and modern," is devoted to the main theoretical aspects that frame Gower's work, ranging from his use of medieval law, rhetoric, theology, and religious attitudes, to approaches incorporating gender and queer studies. The second part, "Things and places: material cultures," examines the cultural locations of the author, not only from geographical and political perspectives, or in scientific and economic context, but also in the transmission of his poetry through the materiality of the text and its reception. "Polyvocality: text and language," the third part, focuses on Gower's trilingualism, his approach to history, and narratological and intertextual aspects of his works. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower is an essential resource for scholars and students of Gower and of Middle English literature, history, and culture generally.

A compelling history of the Black Death that scoured Europe in the mid 14th-century killing twenty-five million people. It was one of the worst human disasters in history. 'The bodies were sparsely covered that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured them...And believing it to be the end of the world, no one wept for the dead, for all expected to die.' Agnolo di Turo, Siena, 1348 In just over a thousand days from 1347 to 1351 the 'Black Death' travelled across medieval Europe killing thirty per cent of its population. It was a catastrophe that touched the lives of every individual on the continent. The deadly Y. Pestis virus entered Europe in October 1347 by Genoese galley at Messina, Sicily. In the spring of 1348 it was devastating the cities of central Italy, by June 1348 it had reached France and Spain, and by August England. At St Mary's, Ashwell, Hertfordshire, an anonymous hand carved the following inscription for 1349: 'Wretched, terrible, destructive year, the remnants of the people alone remain.' According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the plague of 1347-51 is the second worst catastrophe in recorded history. Only World War II produced more death, physical damage, and emotional suffering. Defence analysts use it as the measure of thermonuclear war - in geographical extent, abruptness and casualties. In 'The Great Mortality' John Kelly retraces the journey of the Black Death using original source material - diary fragments, letters and manuscripts. It is the devastating portrait of a continent gripped by an epidemic, but also a very personal story, narrated by the individuals whose lives were touched by it.

Explores how bodies of knowledge developed, concerning folkloric beliefs, magic, sorcery, and witchcraft from the 12th -18th century which allows students to see how culture was exchanged across Europe leading up to the witch-trials of the 17th century and offers an explanation of why the witch-hunts and trials became so prevalent due to a strong belief in the existence of witchcraft in the popular conscious. The collection looks at a range of sources which crossed the religions, political and linguistic boundaries such as objects, legal documents, letters, art, literature, the oral tradition and pamphlets providing students with a range of case studies to deepen their understanding of the period and to inform their own research. Includes examples from across Europe from England to Italy, Norway to France and the Netherlands to Spain. Allowing students to see how these cultural exchanges crossed geographical boundaries to form a collective phenomenon.

The most recent research into the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin worlds. The essays here consider a broad range of topics drawn from the early to central Middle Ages. These include a fascinating glimpse of the controversy surrounding Theodoric of Ostrogoth's identity as a builder king; evidence of Byzantine slavery that emerges from a ninth-century Frankish exegetical tract; conciliar prohibitions against interfaith dining; and a fresh look at the doomed Danish marriage of Philip II of France. The Journal's commitment tosource analysis is continued with chapters examining female authority on the coins of Henry the Lion; the use and meaning of monastic depredation lists; and the relationship between Henry of Huntingdon and Robert of Torigni. Finally, the volume offers a truly rich set of explorations of the political and historiographical dynamics between England and Wales from the tenth century through the late Middle Ages. This volume also contains the Henry Loyn Memorial Lecture for 2008. Contributors: Shane Bobrycki, Gregory I. Halfond, Thomas Heeboll-Holm, Georgia Henley, Jitske Jasperse, Simon Keynes, Maria Cristina La Rocca, Corinna Matlis, Benjamin Pohl, Thomas Roche, Owain WynJones

First survey of one of the most important pre-modern farming systems, and its effects on society and landscape. A landmark volume... essential reading for all those interested in social, agricultural and landscape history, as well as in East Anglia's past. Professor Tom Williamson, University of East Anglia. England in the medieval and early modern periods was farmed under a wide range of agrarian regimes, each of which was both engendered by, and had in turn a determining influence upon, innumerable aspects of society and landscape. Reconstructing the complex history of these systems - how they actually worked on the ground, how and why they first developed and how they evolved over time - is thus crucial for our understanding of the lived experience of past generations and the physical environments which they inhabited. But studies of past agricultural regimes which are detailed enough to highlight their full social, economic and environmental character and implications, are surprisingly thin on the ground. This innovative book dissects the character of one key example - the foldcourse system of East Anglia - from its genesis in the early Middle Ages to its demise in the nineteenth century. It casts a mass of new light on an institution that structured rural life in one region of England, over many centuries. But it also provides important new insights into the nature of early farming systems more generally, and the intricate balance of human agency, and environmental structures, that shaped and sustained them.

Concerned with the basic materials of documents, literature, art, place-names, inscriptions, coins, buildings and archaeological finds, the twenty-two original studies that make up this 1971 text brought fresh understanding to various important topics in Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Native, continental, Scandinavian and Irish elements in five centuries of Anglo-Saxon history are represented. Each contribution exemplifies the methods and expertise of a modern specialisation, but collectively the essays show the value of a joint approach. They form a fitting tribute to a scholar who has kept primary sources to the forefront in her own work and who has illuminated an exceptionally wide range of them.

'Grace books' were the volumes in which scribes recorded decisions of the administration of the University of Cambridge during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of the 'graces' concern the conferral of degrees on individuals, but others refer to more general University business including appointment of teachers and preachers, leaves of absence, inventories and financial records, and the resolution of disputes. Grace Book A covers the period from 1454 to 1488. The Introduction by Stanley M. Leathes explains the medieval terminology and the administrative systems underlying it, and a thorough index is also provided. The Latin documents transcribed and printed in this 1897 publication are a valuable source for those researching fifteenth-century British history and institutions, and this reissue will make them readily available to scholars today.

This is the story of the Franciscan friary in Cambridge, founded in 1225. It describes the new alliance between poverty and learning that was to give fresh vigour to the Order, deeply influencing the life of England as a whole. It provides biographical notes on many Cambridge Franciscans, including the Custodes, Wardens, Vice-Wardens and Lectors, and on the dispute of 1303 6 between the friars and the university. It ends with the dissolution of the Cambridge house in 1538, and the driving out of the friars. The book is an extended version of John R. H. Moorman's Birkbeck Lectures of 1948 9.

James Bass Mullinger (1834 1917) was a University Lecturer in History and Librarian at St. John's College, Cambridge. His monumental three-volume history of the university was the standard one at the turn of the twentieth century. For most of his career Mullinger worked on the project alongside his academic duties and his writing for periodicals, the first volume appearing in 1873 and the last in 1911. His extraordinary range of knowledge and the sheer scale of the work make this ambitious project a landmark in the history of universities in Britain. Volume 1 covers the beginnings of the university and the foundation of the early colleges, up to the death of Erasmus. Mullinger compares medieval Cambridge with the universities of Bologna and Oxford, and always keeps in view the university's influence on the country as a whole through the education of its political and social elites.

James Bass Mullinger (1834 1917) was a University Lecturer in History and Librarian at St. John's College, Cambridge. His monumental three-volume history of the university was the standard one at the turn of the twentieth century. For most of his career Mullinger worked on the project alongside his academic duties and his writing for periodicals, the first volume appearing in 1873 and the last in 1911. His extraordinary range of knowledge and the sheer scale of the work make this ambitious project a landmark in the history of universities in Britain. Volume 2 covers 1535 1625, a century that saw the most turbulent changes in the university as in the country as a whole. In particular, Mullinger shows how the Reformation was enthusiastically supported by Cambridge men, and how it affected education in the period, ending with an assessment of the divisions that were to lead to the Civil War.

James Bass Mullinger (1834-1917) was a University Lecturer in History and Librarian at St. John's College, Cambridge. His monumental History of the University was the standard history of the University at the turn of the twentieth century. For most of his career Mullinger worked on the project, alongside his academic duties and his many articles, the first volume appearing in 1873 and the last in 1911. His extraordinary range of knowledge and the ambition of the work make this an important landmark in the history of universities in Britain. This volume covers the political and religious turmoil of the Civil War and the Restoration, ending symbolically with the decline of the Cambridge Platonists, the major philosophical movement of the seventeenth century. Mullinger describes the role the University played in the rise and fall of Buckingham and of Cromwell, and explores its early connections with America.

This volume fluctuates between conceptualizations of movement; either movements that buildings in the medieval Mediterranean facilitated, or the movements of the users and audiences of architecture. From medieval Anatolia to Southern France and the Genoese colony of Pera across Constantinople, The Fluctuating Sea investigates how the relationship between movement and the experiences of a multiplicity of users with different social backgrounds can provide a new perspective on architectural history. The book acknowledges the shared characteristics of medieval Mediterranean architecture, but it also argues that for the majority of people inhabiting the fragmented microecologies of the Mediterranean, architecture was a highly localized phenomenon. It is the connectivity of such localized experiences that The Fluctuating Sea uncovers. The Fluctuating Sea is a valuable source for students and scholars of the medieval Mediterranean and architectural history.

This book: covers the essential content in the new specifications in a rigorous and engaging way, using detailed narrative, sources, timelines, key words, helpful activities and extension material helps develop conceptual understanding of areas such as evidence, interpretations, causation and change, through targeted activities provides assessment support for A level with sample answers, sources, practice questions and guidance to help you tackle the new-style exam questions. It also comes with three years' access to ActiveBook, an online, digital version of your textbook to help you personalise your learning as you go through the course - perfect for revision.

In the late fifteenth century, the production of print editions of Claudius Ptolemy's second-century Geography sparked one of the most significant intellectual developments of the era-the production of mathematically-based, north-oriented maps. The production of world maps in England, however, was notably absent during this "Ptolemaic revival." As a result, the impact of Ptolemy's text on English geographical thought has been obscured and minimalized, with scholars speculating a possible English indifference to or isolation from European geographic developments. Tracing English geographical thought through the material culture of literary and popular texts, this study provides evidence for the reception and transmission of Ptolemaic-based geography in England during a critical period of geographic innovation and synthesis, one that laid the foundation for modern geographical representation. With evidence from prose romance, book illustration, theatrical performance, cosmological ceilings, and almanacs, Mirror of the World proposes a new, interdisciplinary literary and cartographic history of the influence of Ptolemaic geography in England, one that reveals the lively integration of geographic concepts through narrative and non-cartographic visual forms.

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries. The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others. Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

The first comprehensive study of this war helps us understand how each country to defend the frontier, and the political issues which drove the Anglo-Scottish wars of the 1520s. The Anglo-Scottish War of 1522-1524 saw the mobilisation of tens of thousands of men and vast amounts of resources in both England and Scotland. Beyond its British context, the war had a European significance: it formed an element in the wider Valois-Habsburg struggles over Italy, with the complex systems of alliances spreading the repercussions of this struggle far across the continent and to the borders of England and Scotland. Recent years have seen the emergence of a renewed debate around the status of the Anglo-Scottish frontier and the wider political and social conditions which predominated in the borderlands of each kingdom. Although there has been a move to present the Anglo-Scottish border as a porous frontier where the populations on either side were closely connected, these neighbourly links imploded rapidly in wartime when frontier populations were co-opted into a national struggle. It is significant that borderers were responsible for inflicting the heaviest violence on each other during the war. Drawing on an unprecedented access to English and Sottish sources of the conflict, this book offers an important new contribution to both Scottish and English history as well as the wider military history of late medieval and early modern Europe. Aspects of military mobilisation, logistics, the defence of frontiers, the use of violence against civilians and wartime espionage feature prominently.

This volume presents the analysis, English translation, and critical edition of the Latin text of The Little History of the Lombards of Benevento, thus offering an important contribution for a better understanding of early medieval southern Italian (and Mediterranean) history. In the 840s, having passed the danger of subjugation by Charlemagne, southern Italy's Lombards experienced a bloody civil war that put an end to their unity and turned southern Italy into the playground of several competing powers: Lombard lords, the Neapolitans, the Frankish and the Byzantine Empires, the Muslims, and, sometimes, even the papacy. At the end of the ninth century, the Cassinese monk Erchempert composed a chronicle about this period that blamed the southern Lombard leaders for the terrible crisis of southern Italy. It was Erchempert's desire that future generations could learn from the folly of their forbearers, and his chronicle has since become the most relevant source for southern Italy between the 770s and the 880s. The book will appeal to scholars and students of chronicles, Lombards, Franks, Byzantines, and Muslims in early medieval Italy, as well as all those interested in medieval Europe.

Settlement and Crusade in the Thirteenth Century sheds new light on formerly less explored aspects of the crusading movement and the Latin East during the thirteenth century. In commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the construction of 'Atlit Castle, a significant section of this volume is dedicated to the castle, which was one of the most impressive built in the Latin East. Scholarly debate has centred on the reasons behind the construction of the castle, its role in the defence of the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the thirteenth century, and its significance for the Templar order. The studies in this volume shed new light on diverse aspects of the site, including its cemetery and the surveys conducted there. Further chapters examine Cyprus during the thirteenth century, which under the Lusignan dynasty was an important centre of Latin settlement in the East, and a major trade centre. These chapters present new contributions regarding the complex visual culture which developed on the island, the relation between different social groups, and settlement patterns. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of the medieval period, as well as those interested in the Crusades, archaeology, material culture, and art history.

This book explores accounts in the Sagas of Icelanders of encounters with foreign peoples, both abroad and in Iceland, who are portrayed according to stereotypes which vary depending on their origins. Notably, inhabitants of the places identified in the sagas as Irland, Skotland and Vinland are portrayed as being less civilized than the Icelanders themselves. This book explores the ways in which the Islendingasoegur emphasize this relative barbarity through descriptions of diet, material culture, style of warfare and character. These characteristics are discussed in relation to parallel descriptions of Icelandic characters and lifestyle within the Islendingasoegur, and also in the context of a tradition in contemporary European literature, which portrayed the Icelanders themselves as barbaric. Comparisons are made with descriptions of barbarians in classical Roman texts, primarily Sallust, but also Caesar and Tacitus, showing striking similarities between Roman and Icelandic ideas about barbarians.