This collection is a notable example of how the cultural history of the middle ages can be written in terms that satisfy both the historian and the literary scholar. John Benton's knowledge of the personnel, structure and finance of medieval courts complemented his understanding of the literature they produced.

The Haskins Society, named after the celebrated American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins, was founded in 1982 to provide a forum for the discussion and study of English and related continental history in the middle ages.

The Crusades were a startling and spectacular phenomenon that exerted a powerful influence on European development over a period of many centuries. Much recent writing has been devoted to explaining how the crusades began and what they achieved. This volume is intended as an introductory guide and analysis of how different aspects of crusading studies have developed. Rather than giving an account of events, each chapter offers an interpretative and historiographical study. It is aimed both at postgraduates and at professional academics.

A pocketbook reproduction of the Declaration of Arbroath with historical analysis by Tom Turpie to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. The document is a declaration of Scottish independence as a sovereign state in 1320, rather than a feudal land controlled by England's Norman kings, and to lift the excommunication of Robert the Bruce.

The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).

Edited with a facing-page English translation from the Latin text by: Clover, Helen; Unknown function: Gibson, Margaret

The first serious study of tournaments throughout Europe reveals their importance - in the training of the medieval knight, the development of arms and armour, as an instrument of political patronage, and as a grand public spectacle. Will appeal to a wide audience. It is beautifully presented...the illustrations add further glory to a thorough historical analysis which is based on extensive research in Europe-wide sources... particularly useful in bringing toour attention lesser-known materials from the Iberian peninsula. The level of discussion, range and thoroughness of treatment and excellence of annotation make this a useful reference work for the academic historian too: it is hard to find any aspect of tournaments that is not covered.HISTORY The first serious study of tournaments throughout Europe reveals their importance - in the training of the medieval knight, the development of arms and armour, as an instrument of political patronage, and as a grand public spectacle.

The history of the Aztecs has been haunted by the spectre of human sacrifice. As bloody priests and brutal warriors, the Aztecs have peopled the pages of history, myth and fiction, their spectacular violence dominating perceptions of their culture and casting a veil over their unique way of life. Reinvesting the Aztecs with a humanity frequently denied to them, and exploring their religious violence as a comprehensible element of life and existence, Caroline Dodds Pennock integrates a fresh interpretation of gender with an innovative study of the everyday life of the Aztecs. This was a culture of contradictions and complications, but in amongst the grand ritual we can find the personal and private, the minutiae of life which make the world of these extraordinary people instantly familiar. Despite their violent bloodshed, the Aztecs were a compassionate and expressive people who lived and worked in cooperative gendered partnership.

This book discusses the relationship between religion and medicine around 1300. Joseph Ziegler analyses the spiritual writings of two learned physicians in the light of their medical background. He examines the use of medical knowledge for non-medical purposes, and by clerics who did not engage in medical practice. He suggests that fusion rather than disjunction characterized the relationship between medicine and religion at that time, and that medicine had a cultural role which surpassed its physical therapeutic function.

A period of great change for Europe, the thirteenth-century was a time of both animosity and intimacy for Jewish and Christian communities. In this wide-ranging collection, scholars discuss the changing paradigms in the research and history of Jews and Christians in medieval Europe, discussing law, scholarly pursuits, art, culture, and poetry.

Examination of the role played by key figures around the monarchy in the Wars of the Roses. The reigns of Edward IV and Richard III have long engendered fascination and debate, not least concerning the extent of the authority and power of key individuals surrounding the court at the time. This book examines the most influential men and women at the centre of their regimes: the political power-brokers. They served the king in matters of diplomacy, warfare, court ceremony, local government, and the attempt to keep order amid the ongoing crisis of kingship sparked by the Wars of the Roses. Their close royal association to the king led to rapid increases in their power and fortune. Among their ranks are well-documented figures such as the tragic "Kingmaker", Richard Neville,earl of Warwick, and the steadfast baron William, Lord Hastings. This volume however is also concerned to bring to the forefront lesser discussed figures, including Sir Thomas Montgomery, Edward's close friend whose career was remade by the Yorkist usurpation, and Sir John Fogge, one of the leading men of Kent who prospered under Yorkist rule, yet risked everything by rejecting Richard's right to rule. Grounded on extensive archival research, this book offers a more detailed and nuanced image of the influence the power-brokers wielded and their place in the Yorkist state. It analyses the manifestation of their power and the manner in which they exercised their influence publicly and privately; and establishes their importance in the foundation, maintenance, and downfall of the Yorkist dynasty.

This book is a thematic introductory survey accompanied by a rich selection of written and visual primary sources, which brings the experiences of medieval Jewish women to life for students. Including twenty primary source texts in translation relevant for the study of Jewish women including crusade chronicles, legal codes, economic contracts, marriage contracts, letters, and selections of works composed to guide women's spiritual lives and prayers. These documents provide documents for lectures to use in their seminars and students with a range if sources on which to see how the history of these women has been interpreted. This book explores how medieval Jewish women maneuvered within social norms governed by gender, religious identity, class, and place of residence, and emphasizes the ways in which Jewish women both resembled and differed from their local non-Jewish counterparts, providing students with an encompassing look at Jewish medieval women.

This volume explores and calls into question certain commonly held assumptions about writing and technological advancement in the Islamic tradition. In particular, it challenges the idea that mechanical print naturally and inevitably displaces handwritten texts as well as the notion that the so-called transition from manuscript to print is unidirectional. Indeed, rather than distinct technologies that emerge in a progressive series (one naturally following the other), they frequently co-exist in complex and complementary relationships - relationships we are only now starting to recognize and explore. The book brings together essays by internationally recognized scholars from an array of disciplines (including philology, linguistics, religious studies, history, anthropology, and typography) whose work focuses on the written word - channeled through various media - as a social and cultural phenomenon within the Islamic tradition. These essays promote systematic approaches to the study of Islamic writing cultures writ large, in an effort to further our understanding of the social, cultural and intellectual relationships between manuscripts, printed texts and the people who use and create them.

Edition, with full explanatory material, of the documents concerning the building of All Souls, Oxford: a vital source for our knowledge of the period. The accounts covering the construction of All Souls, Oxford, in the five years from its foundation in 1438 are among the most important documentary sources for English medieval building history, and provide an almost unique recordof the physical creation of an Oxford college. They are here published in full for the first time, with commentary and analysis by the late Simon Walker. Supplementary material includes plans and documentation of the site, a description of the buildings, and an inventory of the college rooms in the sixteenth century. Simon Walker was Professor of History, University of Sheffield; Julian Munby is head of Buildings Archaeology at Oxford Archaeology.

This work is a ground-breaking study of the varieties of holy life available to, and pursued by, early medieval Irish women. The author explores a wide range of source material from legal texts, saints' lives, litanies, penitentials, canons, and poetry in order to illuminate female religious life and changes in attitudes towards it over time.

The book is divided into ecclesiastical, legal, letters, chronicles, biography, conduct books, literary and medical writings to enable students to find sources relevant for their courses by theme. The sources range from well-known texts such as the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales to less familiar sources such as Hincmar of Rheims, Gratian, Peter Damian and Gregory IX, Ibn Hazm's The Ring of the Dove and Boccaccio's De mulieribus Claris. Providing students with a range of examples to use in their seminars and essays. This second edition has been revised throughout to include the literature published since the first edition and expanded to include additional material from European, Jewish and Muslim sources as well as additional material on same-sex relations such as the same-sex marriage rituals. Providing students with the latest debates and sources appropriate for how the field has progressed to inspire them in taking the field forward themselves.

Analysis of varied primary sources, such as as a letter from Anne to her half-brother and an apothecary bill that contains some fertility medicines, allows for a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of how Anne operated her life as well as the wider setting of the court. Much previous scholarship has focused on Anne's relatiosnhips with famous poets, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, but analysis of government documents reveals more about how Anne used her own wealth and status to enact power. This gives greater insight into the power of queenship and female autonomy. Rather than viewing Anne primarily as a wife of Richard II, this volume situates her within the context of medieval queenship which will be useful for all who seek a greater understanding of female power in medieval England.

This collection of documents in translation brings together the seminal sources for the late Merovingian Frankish kingdom. It inteprets the chronicles and saint's lives rigorously to reveal new insights into the nature and significance of sanctity, power and power relationships. The book makes available a range of 7th- and early 8th-century texts, five of which have never before been translated into English. It opens with a broad-ranging explanation of the historical background to the translated texts and then each source is accompanied by a full commentary and an introductory essay exploring its authorship, language and subject matter. The sources are rich in the detail of Merovingian political life. Their subjects are the powerful in society and they reveal the successful interplay between power and sanctity, a process which came to underpin much of European culture throughout the early Middle Ages. -- .

That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another - complementary - explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks - perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.

This book provides a fresh introduction to the political history of late medieval France duing the turbulent period of the "Hundred Years' War," taking into account the social, economic and religious contexts. Graeme Small considers not just the monarchy but also prelates, noble networks and the emerging municipalities in this new analysis.

This collection of sources demonstrates the variety of evidence that survives of English women in all walks of life from the time of Edward I to the eve of the Reformation. The sources are introduced by a substantial overview of current thinking about English medieval women below the level of the greater aristocracy. In addition, Goldberg explores many of the methodological problems and strengths of particular sources. Individual chapters explore the life-cycle themes of childhood, adolescence, married life, widowhood and old age. The study then moves on to examine such topics as work in town and country, prostitution, the law, recreation and devotion. In every case the reader is exposed to a range of sources, but particular attention is paid to those sources that reflect actual experience or provide insights into the lives of ordinary women rather than the prescriptive or purely literary texts. A particular feature of this collection is the extensive use of church court depositions that allow the voices of peasant women, servant girls, bourgeois wives, or poor widows to be heard across the centuries. The sources are presented in a form designed to be accessible to undergraduates, but of interest to teachers and researchers alike. -- .