A full colour map showing London about 1270 to 1300 - its walls and gates, parish churches, early monasteries and hospitals, and a growing number of private houses. The city's streets and alleyways had been established. Dominating London are the Tower of London in the east, the old St Paul's Cathedral in the west and London Bridge in the south. Up-river in Westminster, the abbey and the royal palace had been well established, and the great Westminster Hall is very evident. London's playground in Southwark was beginning to grow.

With his Letter of 1493 to the court of Spain, Christopher Columbus heralded his first voyage to the present-day Americas, creating visions that seduced the European imagination and birthing a fascination with those "new" lands and their inhabitants that continues today. Columbus's epistolary announcement travelled from country to country in a late-medieval media event -- and the rest, as has been observed, is history. The Letter has long been the object of speculation concerning its authorship and intention: British historian Cecil Jane questions whether Columbus could read and write prior to the first voyage while Demetrio Ramos argues that King Ferdinand and a minister composed the Letter and had it printed in the Spanish folio. The Letter has figured in studies of Spanish Imperialism and of Discovery and Colonial period history, but it also offers insights into Columbus's passions and motives as he reinvents himself and retails his vision of Peter Martyr's Novus orbis to men and women for whom Columbus was as unknown as the places he claimed to have visited. The central feature of the book is its annotated variorum edition of the Spanish Letter, together with an annotated English translation and word and name glossaries. A list of terms from early print-period and manuscript cultures supports those critical discussions. In the context of her text-based reading, the author addresses earlier critical perspectives on the Letter, explores foundational questions about its composition, publication and aims, and proposes a theory of authorship grounded in text, linguistics, discourse, and culture.

This book investigates the impact of the ever-changing story of William Wallace on Scottish national identity. Freed from the historian's bedrock of empiricism by a lack of corroborative sources, the biography of this short-lived late-medieval patriot has long been incorporated into the ideology of nationalism. It is to explain this assimilation, and to deconstruct the myriad ways that Wallace's biography has been endlessly refreshed as a national narrative, over many generations, that forms this investigation. William Wallace: A National Tale examines the elision of Wallace's after-life into narrative ascendency, dominating the ideology and politics of nationalism in Scotland. This narrative is conceptualised as the national tale, a term taken out of its literary moorings to scrutinise how the personal biography of a medieval patriot has been evoked and presented as the nation's biography over seven centuries of time. Through the verse of Blind Harry, the romance of Jane Porter, to the historical imaginations of Braveheart and Brave, Scotland's national tale has been forged. This is a fresh, engaging and timely exploration into Wallace's hold over Scotland's national mythology. It reappraises William Wallace as a national figure. It explores Wallace variously as: A Protestant, A Scottish Chief, A Romantic Hero, and a Hollywood Hero. It examines Scotland's obsession with the need for a national hero.

European and Arab versions of the Crusades have little in common. For Arabs, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were years of strenuous efforts to repel a brutal and destructive invasion by barbarian hordes. In "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes", Amin Maalouf has sifted through the works of a score of contemporary Arab chroniclers of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants in the events. He retells their stories in their own vivacious style, giving us a vivid portrait of a society rent by internal conflicts, and shaken by a traumatic encounter with an alien culture. He retraces two critical centuries of Middle Eastern history, and offers fascinating insights into some of the forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.