European history: medieval period, middle ages

The state is the most powerful and contested of political ideas, loved for its promise of order but hated for its threat of coercion.

In this challenging new book Charles Coulson overturns many of the traditional assumptions about the nature and purpose of castle-building in the middle ages.

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house.

Medieval Europe was a rapidly developing society with a problem of violent disorder.

There are over 3,000 runic inscriptions on stone made in Scandinavia in the late Viking Age.

This richly illustrated book explores over seven hundred years of European warfare, from the time of Charlemagne to the end of the middle ages (c.

By 1300, medieval men and women were beginning to measure multitude, counting, for example, numbers of boys and girls being baptized.

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, John Blair's Very Short Introduction to the Anglo-Saxon Age covers the emergence of the earliest English settlements to the Norman victory in 1066.

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, John Gillingham and Ralph A.

This book offers a wide-ranging introduction to the way that art was made, valued, and viewed in northern Europe in the age of the Renaissance, from the late fourteenth to the early years of the sixteenth century.

The Norman Conquest in 1066 was the last time England was successfully invaded, and was one of the most profound turning points in English history, cataclysmically transforming a disparate collection of small nations into a European state.

This book seeks to comprehend the evolving nature of the European Union following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of the European Constitution.

Marsilius of Padua is conventionally seen as a thinker ahead of his time: the first secular political theorist, and the first post-classical thinker to espouse republicanism.

In seventeenth-century Europe the Copts, or the Egyptian members of the Church of Alexandria, were widely believed to hold the key to an ancient wisdom and an ancient theology.

Collecting sixteen thought-provoking new essays by leading medievalists, this volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies.

Acts of Giving examines the issues surrounding donation - the giving of property, usually landed property - in northern 'Christian' Spain in the tenth century, when written texts became very plentiful, allowing us to glimpse the working of local society.

Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages investigates the common medieval belief that magic could cause impotence, focusing particularly on the period 1150-1450.

How were Greek texts on the care and medical treatment of the horse transmitted from antiquity to the present day?

Food and diet are central to understanding daily life in the middle ages.

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history.

What were the historical and cultural processes by which Cyril of Alexandria was elevated to canonical status while his opponent, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, was made into a heretic?

Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative is a study of the varying relationships between verse and prose in a series of Old Norse-Icelandic saga narratives.

The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of those English scholars whose writings determined the curriculum of medieval schools: Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, to name only the best known.

In medieval Britain people wore jewellery made of gold if they were rich, of base metal if they were poor; they might hoard their property, or give it away to guarantee that they would have friends when needed; and many of them paid tax on their possessions.

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states.

This book brings together new and original work by forty two of the world's leading scholars of Indo-European comparative philology and linguistics from around the world.

Tracing the subject from the Middle Ages to the present, David Nash outlines the history of blasphemy as a concept - from a species of heresy to modern understandings of it as a crime against the sacred and individual religious identity.

The period from the late tenth to the early fourteenth centuries was one of the most dynamic in European history.

John Damascene, one-time senior civil servant in the Umayyad Arab Empire, became a monk near Jerusalem in the early years of the eighth century.

The English Romance in Time is a study of English romance across the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The last medieval queens of England were Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville, and Elizabeth of York - four very different women whose lives and queenship were dominated by the Wars of the Roses.

This book constitutes a major reappraisal of the late Anglo-Saxon state on the eve of its demise.

For almost forty years the study of the Iron Age in Britain has been dominated by Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe.

The first study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman canals and waterways, this book is based on new evidence surrounding the nature of water transport in the period.

Integrating the brilliant biography of Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne (953-65) and brother of Emperor Otto I, by the otherwise obscure monk Ruotger, with the intellectual culture of Cologne Cathedral, this is a study of actual politics in conjunction with Ottonian ruler ethic.

The interdict was an important and frequent event in medieval society.

Exploring the effects of war on state power in early modern Europe, this book asks if military competition increased rulers' power over their subjects and forged more modern states, or if the strains of war broke down political and administrative systems.

This fascinating account examines the fate which overtook the principality of Catalonia in the fifteenth century, reducing it from dominance within the state of Aragon to a marginal role in the Iberian power created by the union of Aragon and Castile.

This book suggests that the Old English epic Beowulf was composed in the winter of 826-7 as a requiem for King Beornwulf of Mercia on behalf of Wiglaf, the ealdorman who succeeded him.

Guardians of Republicanism analyses the political and intellectual history of Renaissance Florence-republican and princely-by focusing on five generations of the Valori family, each of which played a dynamic role in the city's political and cultural life.

Focussing on the key role of the English medieval parliament in hearing and determining the requests of the king's subjects, this ground-breaking new study examines the private petition and its place in the late medieval English parliament (c.

The twelve essays in this volume, each written by a leading specialist, present an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Italian Renaissance society, intellectual history, and politics, with each contribution reflecting the most recent innovations in the way that historians view and study the period.

The tomb of Christ at Jerusalem was a vital influence in the making of Western Europe.

The study of the Reformation in England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland has usually been treated by historians as a series of discrete national stories.

The Early Reformation on the Continent offers a fresh look at the formative years of the European Reformation and the origins of Protestant faith and practice.

In this thorough and illuminating work, Michael Prestwich provides a comprehensive study of Plantagenet England, a dramatic and turbulent period which saw many changes.

From the impact of the first monasteries in the seventh century, to the emergence of the local parochial system five hundred years later, the Church was a force for change in Anglo-Saxon society.

This significant new work by a prominent medievalist focusses on the period of transition between 1250 and 1550, when the wealth and power of the great lords was threatened and weakened, and when new social groups emerged and new methods of production were adopted.

This study shows how marriage symbolism emerged from the world of texts to become a social force affecting ordinary people.

Between the 1460s and the 1630s Ireland was transformed from a medieval into a modern society.