Suffolk has been home to monastic communities since St Felix and St Fursey founded the first monasteries in the seventh century, and today the county is home to both awe-inspiring monastic ruins and living communities of men and women devoted to prayer. This first complete survey of the monastic history of Suffolk traces the development of monasticism in the kingdom of East Anglia, its recovery after Viking destruction, and the flourishing of an extraordinary variety of communities in medieval Suffolk, ranging from the immensely powerful Abbey of Bury St Edmunds to tiny friaries and nunneries. The book examines the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries and the survival of the monastic dream, against all odds, in post-Reformation Suffolk. Finally, the book surveys the revival of religious communities in modern Suffolk to the present day, and provides a comprehensive gazeteer of all past and present monasteries in the county.

Throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had a peculiar problem: it had too many talented and ambitious officers, all competing for a limited number of command positions. Given this surplus, we might expect that a major physical impairment would automatically disqualify an officer from consideration. To the contrary, after the loss of a limb, at least twenty-six such officers reached the rank of commander or higher through continued service. Losing a limb in battle often became a mark of honor, one that a hero and his friends could use to increase his chances of winning further employment at sea. Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals focuses on the lives and careers of four particularly distinguished officers who returned to sea and continued to fight and win battles after losing an arm or a leg: the famous admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who fought all of his most historically significant battles after he lost his right arm and the sight in one eye, and his lesser-known fellow amputee admirals, Sir Michael Seymour, Sir Watkin Owen Pell, and Sir James Alexander Gordon. Their stories shed invaluable light on the historical effects of physical impairment and this underexamined aspect of maritime history.