A gripping biography that brings together the most recent research to shed provocative new light on the life of Saint PatrickSaint Patrick was, by his own admission, a controversial figure.
A gripping biography by the author of Brave New WorldIn 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake.
A new historical framework integrating Islam into European and Asian historyIslam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it.
This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline.
From the bestselling author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, comes the story of King Edward III, who - like Elizabeth and Victoria after him - embodied the values of his age, forged a nation out of war and re-made England.
A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian communeAmid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government-the commune-arose in the cities of northern and central Italy.
This book explores knightly stories of medieval manners and is a commentary on what people in the middle ages wore, how they prayed and what they hoped for in this life and the next.
This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.
The definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the MuqaddimaIbn Khaldun (13321406) 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 great minds.
A major reassessment of the vikings and their legacyThe Vikings maintain their grip on our imagination, but their image is too often distorted by myth.
A sweeping, authoritative, and entertaining history of the Christian cult of the saints from its origin to the ReformationFrom its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints-the holy dead.
A new historical framework integrating Islam into European and Asian historyIslam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it.
In this bold approach to late antiquity, Garth Fowden shows how, from the second-century peak of Rome's prosperity to the ninth-century onset of the Islamic Empire's decline, powerful beliefs in One God were used to justify and strengthen "e;world empires.
In Phantoms of Remembrance, Patrick Geary makes important new inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, vividly evoking the everyday lives of eleventh-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past.
A sweeping account of what medieval life was like for ordinary peopleIn The Axe and the Oath, one of the world's leading medieval historians presents a compelling picture of daily life in the Middle Ages as it was experienced by ordinary people.
Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "e;Christian-Muslim divide"e;--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world's Christians lived and worshipped under Muslim rule.
The horrors of the Great Famine (1315-1322), one of the severest catastrophes ever to strike northern Europe, lived on for centuries in the minds of Europeans who recalled tales of widespread hunger, class warfare, epidemic disease, frighteningly high mortality, and unspeakable crimes.
In popular imagination the warfare of the Early Middle Ages is often obscure, unstructured, and unimaginative, lost between two military machines, the 'Romans' and the 'Normans', which saw the country invaded and partitioned.
In popular imagination the warfare of the Early Middle Ages is often obscure, unstructured, and unimaginative, lost between two military machines, the 'Romans' and the 'Normans', which saw the country invaded and partitioned.
In this the second part of his four-volume military and political history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Paul Hill follows the careers of thelflaed, Alfred the Great's eldest daughter, and Edward the Elder, Alfred's eldest son, as they campaigned to expand their rule after Alfred's death.
In this the second part of his four-volume military and political history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Paul Hill follows the careers of thelflaed, Alfred the Great's eldest daughter, and Edward the Elder, Alfred's eldest son, as they campaigned to expand their rule after Alfred's death.
