`Set to become an indispensible series for anyone who wishes to keep abreast of recent work in the field.' WELSH HISTORY REVIEWImportant papers playing a key role in re-awakening scholarly interest in a comparatively neglected period of English history. The thirteen papers in this volume represent a significant step forward in knowledge and understanding of a number of aspects of 13th-century England -in particular its economy, coinage, religious life and belief, manorial farming, language attitudes and norms, cartography and geographic perception, domestic architecture, foreign relations, and internal politics. CONTRIBUTORS: J.L. BOLTON, R.J. EAGLEN, CHRISTOPHER THORNTON, MIRI RUBIN, MARGARET HOWELL, R.A. LODGE, PHILIP DIXON, P.D.A. HARVEY, JEFFREY DENTON, CHRISTOPHER HOLDSWORTH, NICHOLAS C. VINCENT, S.D. CHURCH, ROBIN FRAME.

This collection of essays examines different, but linked, aspects of the social organization of Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The essays broach two fundamental questions: how were social distinctions and divisions perceived and portrayed by the politically active, the writers, and the image-makers; and, bound up with the first question, according to what principles and methods should the modern enquirer perceive and portray the ordering of society during Western Europe's formative years? The contributors bring perspectives from a range of disciplines, from historical, sociological, and literary, to the art-historical and theoretical. Similarly, the contents are not limited to Northwestern Europe, but also address the Muslim Middle East, Dante's Italy, Renaissance Venice, and Adriatic Ragusa (Dubrovnik). An important contribution to the areas of late-medieval and early-modern European social history.