European history: medieval period, middle ages

The authors of The Bright Ages return with a real-life Game of Thrones—the story of the Carolingian Civil War, a bloody, protracted battle pitting brother against brother, father against son, that would end an empire, upend a continent, and redefine...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘A lasting work of social history’ THE TIMES‘A genuinely new history of our nation’ DAN JONES‘This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history’ SPECTATOR FROM THE MULTI-MILLION BESTSELLING HISTORICAL NOVELIST COMES...

‘Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley’s book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year’ Sunday TimesA luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history. Once upon a time in a...

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields. To many, the word ‘Viking’ brings to...

Prophecy, Fate and Memory in the Early and Medieval Celtic World brings together a collection of studies on Celtic inscriptions, religious travel, settlement, penance and prophecy in medieval Celtic nations. The contributors explore the themes of memory,...

The new book by Sunday Times bestselling author of Ancestors and Buried - the final instalment in Professor Alice Roberts' acclaimed trilogy.In her previous two bestsellers, Professor Alice Roberts powerfully and evocatively...

A collection of tales from the Middle Ages that reveal voyages to Heaven and Hell, the realm of the Faery, mystical lands, and encounters with mythic beasts • Shares travelers’ accounts of voyages into the afterlife, alarming creatures of unparalleled...

The history and philosophy of the mysterious Cathar religion and its lost treasure• Demonstrates that Catharism is not simply a heretical Christian cult as it is often portrayed• Examines the evidence for the existence of a lost Cathar treasure and its...

An accessible biography of the venerable Bede, regarded as the father of English history.This book investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673735), the foremost scholar of the early Middle Ages and the 'father of English history.'...

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where...

This book provides a concise and incisive introduction to the Teutonic Knights, or Teutonic Order, the last of the great military orders established in the twelfth century. Evolving into a powerful religious institution, the Knights left a profound and...

Griffinology is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature's many depictions in human culture. Drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, this book shows how the griffin has captured the imagination of people for over 5,000...

Tales Things Tell offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia and Europe in the period before the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. Reflected in objects and materials whose circulation and reception defined...

Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the...

This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor...

A recreation of medieval people's experience of time.Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people's experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to...

A witty and concise look at the beginnings of English history, when the nation consolidated after clashes between the Saxons and invading Vikings.In 871, three of England's four kingdoms were overrun by Vikings, the ruthless, all-conquering Scandinavian...

From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerising account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects.Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used in worship a plethora of objects, not only...

The archipelagic kingdoms of Man and the Isles that flourished from the last quarter of the eleventh century down to the middle of the thirteenth century represent two forgotten kingdoms of the medieval British Isles. They were ruled by powerful...

In late medieval England, ordinary people, apothecaries and physicians gathered up practical medical tips for everyday use. While some were sensible herbal cures, many were weird and wonderful. This book selects some of the most revolting or remarkable...

Early manuscripts in the English language include religious works, plays, romances, poetry and songs, as well as charms, notebooks, science and medieval medicine. How did scribes choose to arrange the words and images on the page in each manuscript? How...

Based mainly on examples in the Bodleian Library, this lavishly illustrated account tells the story of manuscript production from the early Middle Ages to the high Renaissance. Each stage of production is described, from the preparation of the parchment,...

From the author of Twitter's Medieval Death Bot comes Unfortunate Ends: On Murder and Misadventure in Medieval England, an illuminating collection of in-depth looks at the most interesting cases from medieval coroners' rolls.Thomas, son of Henry...

An illuminating exploration of the surprisingly familiar sex lives of ordinary medieval people.The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much - or too little - sex, while the Roman Catholic Church...

In The Middle Ages and the Movies, eminent historian Robert Bartlett takes a fresh, cogent look at how our view of medieval history has been shaped by eight significant films of the twentieth century. The book ranges from the concoction of sex and...

Heroes and Marvels of the Middle Ages is a history like no other: it is a history of the imagination, presented through two celebrated groups of the period. One group consists of heroes: Charlemagne, El Cid, King Arthur, Orlando, Pope Joan, Melusine,...

The Goths are truly a 'lost civilization'. Sweeping down from the north, ancient Gothic tribes sacked the imperial city of Rome and set in motion the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire. Ostrogothic and Visigothic kings ruled over Italy and...

"This book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the true history of the founding of the most powerful nation on earth." -Scott Wolter, host of America Unearthed and author of Cryptic Code of the Templars in AmericaUsing archival and...

"This is a wonderful anthology . Its texts not only span the whole of Luther's reforming career, but also cover the theological, political, and social issues that mattered most to him and his age. Best of all, the original integrity of the texts remains...

In existence for 258 years, the English East India Company ran a complex, highly integrated global trading network. Over time, the Company developed a pronounced and aggressive colonialism that laid the foundation for Britain's Eastern empire. A study of...

Some myths don't die, and lies are still being told about Christopher Columbus: that he "discovered" the Americas (not only was the land familiar to native inhabitants, but it had also been visited before by Europeans), that the land was sparsely...

An original, beautifully produced work that explores the 'star demons' and their correspondences in magic and astrology as revealed in the medieval grimoires and classical esoteric texts.Includes:A translucent, velum dust...

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these 'eternal'...

This book investigates the troubled relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. Acknowledging that the medieval and medievalism are mutually constitutive, and that their texts can be read using similar strategies, it argues that medieval...

In this new edition of A Short History of the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein offers a panoramic view of the medieval world. Volume II ranges from England to China and from West Africa to the Baltic, while never losing sight of the main contours of the...

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with...

Monasticism in late medieval England, c.1300-1535 provides the first collection of translated sources on this subject. The volume covers both male and female houses of all orders and sizes, and offers a range of new perspectives on the character and...

Abbot Regino of Prum (d.915) was the last great historian of the Carolingian Empire, which spanned around a million square kilometres of continental western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries. His Chronicle is the essential account of the...

This sourcebook collects together for the first time in English the major documents relating to the life and contemporary reputation of Joan of Arc. Also known as La Pucelle, she led a French Army against the English in 1429, arguably turning the course...

This is an important collection of pioneering essays penned by the late Simon Walker, a highly respected historian of late medieval England.One of the finest scholars of his generation, Walker's writing is lucid, inspirational, and has permanently...

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known...

A renowned historian addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and...

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local...

The definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the MuqaddimaIbn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's...

The Vikings maintain their grip on our imagination, but their image is too often distorted by myth. It is true that they pillaged, looted, and enslaved. But they also settled peacefully and traveled far from their homelands in swift and sturdy ships to...

In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this...

Warriors of the Cloisters tells how key cultural innovations from Central Asia revolutionized medieval Europe and gave rise to the culture of science in the West. Medieval scholars rarely performed scientific experiments, but instead contested issues in...