Byzantine Athens was not a city without a history, as is commonly believed, but an important center about which much can now be said. Providing a wealth of new evidence, Professor Kaldellis argues that the Parthenon became a major site of Christian pilgrimage after its conversion into a church. Paradoxically, it was more important as a church than it had been as a temple: the Byzantine period was its true age of glory. He examines the idiosyncratic fusion of pagan and Christian culture that took place in Athens, where an attempt was made to replicate the classical past in Christian terms, affecting rhetoric, monuments, and miracles. He also re-evaluates the reception of ancient ruins in Byzantine Greece and presents for the first time a form of pilgrimage that was directed not toward icons, Holy Lands, or holy men but toward a monument embodying a permanent cultural tension and religious dialectic.

Using artifacts as primary sources, this book enables students to comprehensively assess and analyze historic evidence in the context of the medieval period. This new addition to the Daily Life through Artifacts series provides not only the full benefit of a reference work with its comprehensive explanations and primary sources, but also supplies images of the objects, bringing a particular aspect of the medieval world to life. Each entry in Artifacts from Medieval Europe explains and expands upon the cultural significance of the artifact depicted. Artifacts are divided into such thematic categories as domestic life, religion, and transportation. Considered collectively, the various artifacts provide a composite look at daily life in the Middle Ages. Unlike medieval history encyclopedias that feature brief reference entries, this book uses artifacts to examine major aspects of daily life. Each artifact entry features an introduction, a description, an examination of its contextual significance, and a list of further resources. This approach trains students how to best analyze primary sources. General readers with an interest in history will also benefit from this approach to learning that enables a more complete appreciation of past events and circumstances. Provides a single-volume resource for using medieval artifacts to better understand the long-ago past Supplies images of artifacts with detailed descriptions, explanations of significance, and a list of sources for more information, which help students learn how to effectively analyze primary sources Presents a virtual window into many different aspects of medieval society and life, including particular activities or roles-such as farming, weaving, fashion, or being a mason or a knight Includes sidebars within selected entries that explain key terms and concepts and supply excerpts from contemporary sources

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of celibate marriage as depicted in the lives of three couples who achieved sainthood. Marriage without intercourse appears to have no purpose, especially in Christian antiquity, yet these three tales were copied for centuries. What messages were they promoting? What did it mean to be a virgin husband and a virgin wife? Including full translations, this volume sets each life in its historical context, and by examining their individual and shared themes, the book shows that the tension raised by pitting marriage against celibacy is constantly debated. It also highlights the ingenuity of Byzantine hagiographers as they attempted to reconcile this curious paradox. The book addresses a gap in late Antique and Byzantine hagiographic studies where primary sources and interpretative material are very rarely presented in the same volume. By providing a variety of contexts to the material a much more comprehensive, revealing and holistic picture of celibate marriage emerges. >

Drawing from theatre, English studies, and art history, among others, these essays discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern texts in the 21st-century university. Topics range from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture as pedagogical tools.

Examining the developments in the political and religious landscape of Western Europe between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Power and Faith explores the origins of dominant nation Sates and religious institutions in the West emerged out of the fractured and fragmented post-Carolingian world. As a foundational text for those new to the period, the book offers a clear chronological framework for understanding and analysing the emerging polities of Western Europe and an examination of the influence of the Papacy and the Crusades across Christian life and culture. Mixed with careful consideration of major social and economic themes including urbanisation, rural revolution, and the role of women in politics, religion, and society, the book gives a uniquely comprehensive overview of political and religious developments in Western Europe during a neglected yet fundamentally significant period. The book is divided into six parts, part one sets out the scope and aims of the book and discusses the sources used. Parts two and six provide overviews of the political and religious states of affairs in Europe at the start and end of the period respectively. Framed by these sections, the book is divided into three chronologically-ordered parts each containing three chapters, the first offers a brief account of the main historiography of the period concerned, the second provides a thorough account and analysis of the main political developments across Europe during it and the third explores the main religious changes. Power and Faith is an essential introductory guide for students and researchers interested in politics, religion, and society in Western Europe during the middle ages.

William Wey, fifteenth-century Devon priest, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and Bursar of Eton College, made three pilgrimages between 1456 and 1462 - to Compostella, Rome and the Holy Land. Prompted by his friends to write an account of these pilgrimages, he describes in vivid detail his travels through seas patrolled by Turkish galleys across Europe which at that time was embroiled in turmoil from local conflicts. The complete text of his narrative has never before been translated into modern English. For students of this period, which bridges the medieval and early modern worlds, Wey's account adds a new dimension to the phenomenon of pilgrimage. He himself is an attractive and intriguing person of many talents, practical, adventurous and highly observant, and eminently resourceful. While waiting for the pilgrim galley to sail to Jaffa, for example, Wey spent over a month in Venice and gives a colourful account of that city in its heyday. His biblical knowledge is formidable and his use of sources exact and apposite. He provides practical and homely advice on kit, conduct and currency. He also includes comparative English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew vocabularies, gazetteers of places, roads and distances, and two poems. Medieval pilgrim accounts are relatively rare and The Itineraries provides a fascinating insight into travel, religious faith and the topography of fifteenth-century Europe and beyond.

This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come. -- .

In this collection leading international authorities analyse the structures and economic functions of non-agrarian centres between ca. 500 and 1000 A.D. a " their trade, their surrounding settlements, and the agricultural and cultural milieux. The thirty-one papers presented at an international conference held in Bad Homburg focus on recent archaeological discoveries in Central Europe (Vol.1), as well as onthose from southeastern Europe to Asia Minor (Vol. 2).

Contrary to common assumptions, medieval and early modern writers and poets often addressed the high value of freedom, whether we think of such fable authors as Marie de France or Ulrich Bonerius. Similarly, medieval history knows of numerous struggles by various peoples to maintain their own freedom or political independence. Nevertheless, as this study illustrates, throughout the pre-modern period, the loss of freedom could happen quite easily, affecting high and low (including kings and princes) and there are many literary texts and historical documents that address the problems of imprisonment and even enslavement (Georgius of Hungary, Johann Schiltberger, Hans Ulrich Krafft, etc.). Simultaneously, philosophers and theologians discussed intensively the fundamental question regarding free will (e.g., Augustine) and political freedom (e.g., John of Salisbury). Moreover, quite a large number of major pre-modern poets spent a long time in prison where they composed some of their major works (Boethius, Marco Polo, Charles d'Orleans, Thomas Malory, etc.). This book brings to light a vast range of relevant sources that confirm the existence of this fundamental and impactful discourse on freedom, imprisonment, and enslavement.

In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden, was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history and literature to reinvent her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined. Nancy Marie Brown links the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines Hervor's adventures intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as the Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor's short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, the sagas, poetry and myth carry weapons. In this compelling narrative, Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.

The civil wars of the first half of the fifteenth century still stand in the popular imagination as the period of greatest anarchy in English history. While historians have long taken a more measured view, controversy still surrounds their interpretation. In this revised edition of his revaluation of the Wars of the Roses, A. J. Pollard has incorporated into the text the product of new research and consideration of the debates which have emerged since the book was first published in 1988. These include the new stress on 'constitutional' history, intensified dispute about the origins of the wars, and recent reinterpretations of the careers of some of the principal personalities. In a topic which has become more contested in the last decade of the twentieth century, this introduction offers a succinct narrative, a review of the historiography and an overview of the problems of interpretation of the character, causes, impact and consequences of the wars which periodically disrupted England between 1459 and 1487.

John Fisher was central to the issues and dilemmas of the renaissance and the transformation in Tudor England. Active as a humanist, preacher, bishop, educationalist and controversial theologian, Fisher demonstrated that the rich life of the pre-reformation church as well as its problems in confronting the "blind and disordered desire" of Henry VIII. For Fisher, as for Thomas More, this resulted in execution on Tower Hill. This study focuses on Fisher's wide-ranging pastoral, scholarly, literary and political activity, which makes him a key figure in European religious and cultural history.

"Simon of Genoa's Medical Lexicon", an edited volume based on the conference held on March 17th, 2012, is part of the Simon Online project - a dynamically growing Wiki edition of Simon of Genoa's Clavis sanationis, a Latin-Greek-Arabic medical dictionary from the late 13th century. In the individual articles, written by well-known scholars, authorities in their fields of research, Simon and his major work, are approached from different perspectives and as a whole. The volume offers a comprehensible and well-balanced collection of current research on Simon and Clavis sanationis. The volume demonstrates the importance of the Clavis, not only for the history of pharmacology and medicine, but also for Byzantine and medieval studies, Roman, Greek, Latin and Arabic philology and lexicography. Barbara Zipser (Doctor of Philosophy, Wellcome Trust University Award 2006, 2010) is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Body and Material Culture, History Department, Royal Holloway University of London. Her main field of research is Greek medicine from Galen to the late Middle Ages, with an emphasis on textual criticism, manuscript transmission, and the formation of Greek vernacular terminology. Dr Zipser is a well-known and promising young scholar in the field of Ancient and Medieval Medicine. She runs Simon Online (http://www.simonofgenoa.org) - the joint edition and translation project of Simon of Genoa's Clavis sanationis, a dictionary of Latin, Greek and Arabic medical terminology in Wiki format.

China's role in world history is again controversial thanks to Andre Gunder Frank's Re Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. By contrast, this book presents an alternative interpretation of that role, less exclusively economic, more broadly based, and focused on the T'ang period, one of China's acknowledged golden ages. It shows how a different China, Buddhist or Taoist rather than Confucian, aristocratic as much as meritocratic, achieved, through openness to the outside world and partnership with its elites, a multiple pre eminence in politics, economics, society and the intellect, not unlike that enjoyed by the United States today. Within a looser web of globalization, the T'ang period and its dynamics offers a distant mirror of our own time. An argument in world history may thus cast light on issues in contemporary politics. MARKET 1: Undergraduates and postgraduates studying courses in Chinese History; World History; Macroeconomic History.

The monk Rodulfus Glaber is best known for his Five Books of Histories, a major source for events in the first half of the eleventh century, and valuable above all for revealing the mental furniture of an eleventh-century monk - for his account of the millennium, of relics genuine and false, of church-building, and visions of saints and demons. This edition, the first since 1866, presents the only critical text of the Histories, accompanied by a complete translation and a full historical commentary. Glaber also wrote a Life of his mentor, St William of Dijon, the renowned monastic reformer. The Life is reprinted after the Histories, again with translation and notes. The evidence for Glaber's life, and the value of his work are discussed in a Historical Introduction.

A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages. 'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year 'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times 'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore 5 stars! Daily Telegraph 'A masterpiece' De Morgen 'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages. It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these 'eternal' lights. It investigates how the cost of lighting was met across western Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, revealing the social organisation that was built up around maintaining the lights in the belief that burning them reduced the time spent in Purgatory. When that belief collapsed in the Reformation the eternal lights were summarily extinguished. The history of the lights thus offers not only a new account of change in medieval Europe, but also a sustained examination of the relationship between materiality and belief. -- .

This work is a fascinating history of precontact North America, presenting the facts and engaging the reader by using alternative history-what if key facts were different?-to help develop critical thinking skills. The first title in ABC-CLIO's groundbreaking series Turning Points-Actual and Alternate Histories delves into the history of North America before European contact. There is much classroom literature on Native Americans after first contact; there is little on the history before. This work fills that gap, detailing the thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Climate changes, major battles, technology, and settlement patterns-all played a part in shaping the pre-Columbian history of North America. This book takes eight key points in history, presents the facts as they happened, and examines what might have happened if there were different outcomes. Small changes can produce vastly different results; this book shows how, and engages students' critical thinking skills while teaching them basic history. Extensive chronology shows context for events and gives scope and coverage in single graphic presentation Eight original essays, written by distinguished scholars specializing in Native America, followed by discussion questions

Grafting musicology and literary studies together in an unprecedented manner, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut investigates French and Occitan "courtly love" songs from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and explores the paradoxical relationship of music and self-expression in the Middle Ages. While these love songs conceived and expressed the autonomous subject - the lyric "I" represented by a single line of melody - they also engaged highly conventional musical and poetic language, and required performers and scribes for their transmission. This paradox was understood by the poets and became the basis for irony, parody, and intertextual referencing, which instilled the lyrics with a characteristic self-consciousness that reflected the unstable conditions for self-expression.
Author Judith Peraino reveals similar operations at work in musical settings. Examining moments where voice, melody, rhythm, form, and genre come dramatically to the fore and seem to comment on music itself, Giving Voice to Love strives not only to hear self-expression in these love songs, but to understand how musical elements give voice to the complex issues of self and subjectivity encoded in medieval love.
Through its approach to the exploration of "courtly love" songs, Giving Voice to Love serves as a model for methodological integration and provides musicologists, literary scholars and medieval historians with a common analytical ground.

Fresh investigations into heresy after 1300, demonstrating its continuing importance and influence. From the Gregorian reforms to the Protestant Reformation, heresies and heretics helped shape the religious, political, and institutional structures of medieval Europe. Within this larger history of religious ferment, the late medieval period presents a particularly dynamic array of heterodox movements, dissident modes of thought, and ecclesiastical responses. Yet recent debates about the nature of heresy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have too easily created an impression of the period after 1300 as merely an epilogue to the high medieval story. This volume takes the history of heresy in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) on its own terms. From Paris to Prague and fromnorthern Germany to Italy and even extending as far as Ethiopia, the essays shed new light on a vibrant world of audacious beguines, ardent Joachites, Spiritual Franciscans, innovative mystics, lay prophets, idiosyncratic alchemists, daring magicians, and even rebellious princes locked in battles with the papacy. As befits a collection honoring the pioneering career of Robert E. Lerner, the studies collected here combine close readings of manuscripts andother sources with a grounding in their political, religious and intellectual contexts, to offer fresh insights into heresies and heretics in late medieval Europe. MICHAEL D. BAILEY is Professor of History at Iowa State University; SEAN L. FIELD is Professor of History at the University of Vermont. Contributors: Louisa A. Burnham, Elizabeth Casteen, Joerg Feuchter, Samantha Kelly, Richard Kieckhefer, Deeana Copeland Klepper, FrancesKneupper, Georg Modestin, Barbara Newman, Sylvain Piron, Justine L. Trombley.

In the context of the early twelfth-century urbanization of Paris, Hugh of St Victor developed a pioneering program of intellectual and moral practices focused on reforming the soul. Boyd Taylor Coolman identifies the signature theme of spiritual re-formation as the unifying motif to Hugh's theology and analyzes the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of re-formation conceived as 'soul-construction', in the manner of Gothic cathedrals being built at the time. This study places Hugh of St Victor within the context of the profound economic, political and cultural changes characteristic of the twelfth century. Drawing on the majority of Hugh's writings, it reveals links between various aspects of his theology - exegesis and spirituality; theology and cultivation of virtue - and highlights the practical nature of his reforming program, aimed both at restoring the beauty of the soul and re-forming the human person into a dwelling place for the presence of God.

This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring. -- .

A TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY 'The Red Prince announces Helen Carr as one of the most exciting new voices in narrative history.' Dan Jones Son of Edward III, brother to the Black Prince, father to Henry IV and the sire of all the Tudors. Always close to the English throne, John of Gaunt left a complex legacy. Too rich, too powerful, too haughty... did he have his eye on his nephew's throne? Why was he such a focus of hate in the Peasants' Revolt? In examining the life of a pivotal medieval figure, Helen Carr paints a revealing portrait of a man who held the levers of power on the English and European stage, passionately upheld chivalric values, pressed for the Bible to be translated into English, patronised the arts, ran huge risks to pursue the woman he loved... and, according to Shakespeare, gave the most beautiful of all speeches on England.