Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: A Guide for Studying and Teaching empowers students by providing them with the conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the period. Throughout the book, major research questions and historiographical debates are identified and guidance is given on how to engage with and evaluate key documentary sources as well as artistic and archaeological evidence. The book's aim is to engender confidence in creative and independent historical thought. This second edition has been fully revised and expanded and now includes coverage of both Islamic and Byzantine history, surveying and critically examining the often radically different scholarly interpretations relating to them. Also new to this edition is an extensively updated and closely integrated companion website, which has been carefully designed to provide practical guidance to teachers and students, offering a wealth of reference materials and aids to mastering the period, and lighting the way for further exploration of written and non-written sources. Accessibly written and containing over 70 carefully selected maps and images, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050 is an essential resource for students studying this period for the first time, as well as an invaluable aid to university teachers devising and delivering courses and modules on the period.

Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: A Guide for Studying and Teaching empowers students by providing them with the conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the period. Throughout the book, major research questions and historiographical debates are identified and guidance is given on how to engage with and evaluate key documentary sources as well as artistic and archaeological evidence. The book's aim is to engender confidence in creative and independent historical thought. This second edition has been fully revised and expanded and now includes coverage of both Islamic and Byzantine history, surveying and critically examining the often radically different scholarly interpretations relating to them. Also new to this edition is an extensively updated and closely integrated companion website, which has been carefully designed to provide practical guidance to teachers and students, offering a wealth of reference materials and aids to mastering the period, and lighting the way for further exploration of written and non-written sources. Accessibly written and containing over 70 carefully selected maps and images, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050 is an essential resource for students studying this period for the first time, as well as an invaluable aid to university teachers devising and delivering courses and modules on the period.

The Power of Place explores the nature of power--the power of kings, emperors, and popes--through the places that these rulers created or developed, including palaces, cities, landscapes, holy places, inauguration sites, and burial places. Ranging across all of Europe from the first to the sixteenth centuries--from Prague and Seville to Palermo and the Oslo Fjord--David Rollason examines how these places conveyed messages of power and what those messages were. Rollason draws on the latest research in a range of disciplines--principally archaeology, and the histories of art, architecture, and landscape, as well as historical and literary studies--to investigate what the power of rulers consisted of. Was their power based on impersonal bureaucratic mechanisms, on personal relationships between rulers and subjects, or on strong beliefs in the quasi-divine status of rulers? How did impressive edifices support and emphasize these practices of power? Rollason takes readers to spectacular sites, including the remarkable remains of the tenth-century city of Madinat al-Zahra near Cordoba, the remarkably preserved palace-church of the emperor Charlemagne in Aachen, and the soaring shrine-church of the Saint-Chapelle of King Louis IX. Giving readers the tools to analyze rulers' palaces, landscapes, cities, and holy places, The Power of Place offers a fascinating perspective on the development of power throughout history.

This book deals with the rise and fall of the kingdom of Northumbria. It examines the mechanisms of ethnic, political, social and religious change which, beginning after the end of the Roman Empire, welded the large and disparate area between the Humber and the Firth of Forth into one of the most powerful kingdoms of early medieval England, and those which led to its disintegration and its replacement by political structures of northern England and southern Scotland. The story is set in a wider European context so that the history of Northumbria is seen as paradigmatic for an understanding of state formation and religious and cultural change in the early medieval world. Full attention is given to archaeological and art-historical material, and the extent to which narrative sources were shaped by sectional interests and created imagined visions of the past.

The text edited and translated here for the first time for over a century is the most complete and detailed account of the church of Durham down to the early twelfth century. It is also important in the study of historical writing after the Norman Conquest, especially as recent research has cast considerable light on the identity and activities of its author, Symeon of Durham.