The Body Broken is a thematic survey of Europe in the late Middle Ages, a period of huge crisis, conflict and religious change that included the Black Death, the Reformation, the Peasants' Revolt and the Renaissance. This thoroughly updated and revised second edition retains the thematic approach of the first edition, combining sweeping interpretive synthesis with careful attention to recent and revisionist scholarship. It also devotes more attention to the histories of women and religious minorities, Renaissance humanism, politics and government in Italy and eastern Europe, and the religious reformations of the early sixteenth century. Examining late medieval and Renaissance Europe in the context of its place within global history, this book covers all the key areas, including: society and the economy - disaster and demography; individuals, families and communities; trade, technology, exploration and new discoveries; politics - government and the state; political developments; war, chivalry and crusading; religion - the institutional Church; Catholic devotion; religious minorities and dissenting beliefs and practices; religious reformations; culture - schooling and intellectual developments; language, literacy and the arts. Equipped with maps, tables, illustrations, a chronology and an annotated bibliography, The Body Broken is an essential and complete student's guide to Europe in the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries.

From the time of its composition (c.1280) for Philip the Fair of France until the early sixteenth century, Giles of Rome's mirror of princes, the De regimine principum, was read by both lay and clerical readers in the original Latin and in several vernacular translations, and served as model or source for several works of princely advice. This study examines the relationship between this didactic political text and its audience by focusing on the textual and material aspects of the surviving manuscript copies, as well as on the evidence of ownership and use found in them and in documentary and literary sources. Briggs argues that lay readers used De regimine for several purposes, including as an educational treatise and military manual, whereas clerics, who often first came into contact with it at university, glossed, constructed apparatus for, and modified the text to suit their needs in their later professional lives.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is the first volume of a critical edition of the last of John Trevisa's major translations (previously unavailable in print). The "De regimine principum," a Latin treatise on the education of princes, was composed originally for the French King Philip the Fair (1238-1314) and translated by Cornishman John Trevisa (c. 1342-1402), chaplain and man of letters to Thomas IV Lord Berkeley, a baronial representative in the deposition of the English King Richard II in 1399. The work comprises 182 folios of the Bodleian manuscript Digby 233, which is the only surviving copy of the translation-perhaps even copied and corrected from Trevisa's autograph.
This edition will be of great value to scholars interested in the reception and transmission of "De regimine principum," which with its nearly 300 known surviving manuscripts-55 of them having a medieval English provenance-in Latin and most European vernaculars, was one of the most popular and influential political/didactic works of the later Middle Ages.
The second volume of this edition will explicitly place the text and its author within a larger historical and linguistic context and will include textual variants and a glossary.

The Body Broken is a thematic survey of Europe in the late Middle Ages, a period of huge crisis, conflict and religious change that included the Black Death, the Reformation, the Peasants' Revolt and the Renaissance. This thoroughly updated and revised second edition retains the thematic approach of the first edition, combining sweeping interpretive synthesis with careful attention to recent and revisionist scholarship. It also devotes more attention to the histories of women and religious minorities, Renaissance humanism, politics and government in Italy and eastern Europe, and the religious reformations of the early sixteenth century. Examining late medieval and Renaissance Europe in the context of its place within global history, this book covers all the key areas, including: society and the economy - disaster and demography; individuals, families and communities; trade, technology, exploration and new discoveries; politics - government and the state; political developments; war, chivalry and crusading; religion - the institutional Church; Catholic devotion; religious minorities and dissenting beliefs and practices; religious reformations; culture - schooling and intellectual developments; language, literacy and the arts. Equipped with maps, tables, illustrations, a chronology and an annotated bibliography, The Body Broken is an essential and complete student's guide to Europe in the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries.

From the time of its composition (c.1280) for Philip the Fair of France until the early sixteenth century, Giles of Rome's mirror of princes, the De regimine principum, was read by both lay and clerical readers in the original Latin and in several vernacular translations, and served as model or source for several works of princely advice. This study examines the relationship between this didactic political text and its audience by focusing on the textual and material aspects of the surviving manuscript copies, as well as on the evidence of ownership and use found in them and in documentary and literary sources. Briggs argues that lay readers used De regimine for several purposes, including as an educational treatise and military manual, whereas clerics, who often first came into contact with it at university, glossed, constructed apparatus for, and modified the text to suit their needs in their later professional lives.