The most authentic edition of Chaucer's Complete Works available.- The fruit of years of scholarship by an international team of experts- A new foreword by Christopher Cannon introduces students to recent developments in Chaucer Studies- A detailed introduction covers Chaucer's life, works, language, and verse- Includes on-the-page glosses, explanatory notes, textual notes, bibliography, and a glossary

    Laboriously written by hand and often sumptuously decorated, they have always been highly valued and remain as brilliant, fascinating and popular as ever.Christopher de Hamel vividly describes the circumstances in which such books were created - from the earliest monastic Gospel Books to the most lavish Books of Hours. For the second edition of this book, the text has been revised and updated and the whole volume completely redesigned with a striking wealth of new colour illustrations.

    Erskine's extraordinary romance has been translated into 17 languages and has sold well over a million copies worldwide.

    

    A renowned medievalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of original sources and a passion for history, Bumke overlooks no detail, from the material realities of aristocratic society -- the castles and clothing, weapons and transportation, food, drink, and table etiquette -- to the behavior prescribed and practiced at tournaments, knighting ceremonies, and great princely feasts. The courtly knight and courtly lady, and the transforming idea of courtly love, are seen through the literature that celebrated them, and we learn how literacy among an aristocratic laity spread from France through Germany and became the basis of a cultural revolution. At the same time, Bumke clearly challenges those who have comfortably confused the ideals of courtly culture with their expression in courtly society.

    

    Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the waysfourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions.Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy.Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes thateven the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

    

    Woodhouse emphasizes Plethon's controversy with George Scholarios on the respective meritsof Plato and Aristotle and his important impact on the Italian humanists during the Council of Union at Ferrara and Florence in 1438-9. Though Plethon's ambition to create a new religion based on Neoplatonism was never realized, his ideas had a significant influence on the westernRenaissance.

    In the battle, Giles, lord of De la Noye, dies, and Hyatt claims Giles's widow, Aurelie, by right of conquest. She resists him and bitterly resents him, thinking him responsible for Giles's death, and lamenting her own loss of power. But both her own strong sexual attraction to him and her growing awareness that he is an excellent landowner who promotes the welfare of his subordinates change her attitude. As she grows to love him, he comes to acknowledge at last his love and need for her.

    It covers the travellers and their routes, and emphasizes their importance to the exchange of ideas and the spread of civilization.

    Yet in England, there was greater interest in a different class of technology-the feedback device, such as the safety valve on a steam engine, that could control itself internally;self-regulating systems were hallmarks not only of practical technology but also of the abstract theories of Newton and Adam Smith.Otto Mayr, the director of Germany's leading technological museum, explores the relationship between machinery, technological thought, and culture. Contrasting England and the Continent, particularly in the eighteenth century, he uncovers a stikring pattern of technological metaphors applied to political systems-and lays the foundations of a new intellectual history of technology

    

    

    Powell here offers a new interpretation of the Fifth Crusade's historical and social impact, and a richly rewarding view of life in the thirteenth century. Powell addresses such questions as the degree of popular interest in the crusades, the religious climate of the period, the social structure of the membership of the crusade, and the effects of the recruitment effort on the outcome.

    The twins were dominant and colourful characters, whose lives reveal many new points about the politics of the period, in particular the Norman rebellion of 1123-4, the wars of Stephen's reign in Normandy and England and the early years of Henry II. The book analyses the twins' followings, revenues and lands, and studies their relations with the church, their level of literacy, and heraldry. It also contains the first in-depth study of Norman feudal society in the duchy itself, suggests reasons why Normandy was more difficult to govern than England, and explores the use of patronage in twelfth-century society.

    This external history of the nation reflects its internal history, not least in a tendency towards opposite extremes. It is a tale of dramatic incidents and craggy characters, of the Scots' concern with education, evangelism and philanthropy but also with their spying, swindles and drug-running. It tells of Scottish regiments on the rampage and in humiliation, of savages eating missionaries and of colonists committing atrocities. It runs from heroic Christian pioneers such as David Livingstone and Mary Slessor to hot-blooded compatriots who had other encounters with alien cultures: William Gladstone (an English statesman but also a Liverpudlian Scot) who hit a Greek bishop on the chin, the Earl of Elgin who burned the Summer Palace in Peking, and many more. Throughout his book Michael Fry takes care to connect the colourful external history with the more humdrum realities of the internal history, but especially with the continuing development of the Scottish intellect which has done so much to keep the idea of the nation alive.What emerges is a history also of Scotland's precarious place in the world, from hard-fought independence to uncertain Union, from deceptive imperialism to self-government now seeking its definitive form. No other small nation can boast such wealth of experience to face the uncertainties of the future.

    Retells the adventures of Odysseus as he makes his way home to his wife, Penelope, after ten years of fighting the Trojan War.

    Part of the Visual History of Costume series, including detailed descriptions, comments on class and details of fashion at particular times.

    

    Howard Bloch argues that medieval French comic tales are shocking not so much for their dirty words, scatology, and celebration of the body in all its concavities and protrusions, but moreso for their insistent exposure of the scandal of their own production. Looking first at fabliaux about poets, Bloch demonstrates that the medieval comic poet was highly conscious of the inadequacy of language and pushed this perception to its logical, scandalous limit. The comic function of the fabliaux was intentionally disruptive: anticlerical, antifeminist, and antiestablishment, these tales were part of a sophisticated culture's critical perspective on itself. By showing how the medieval poet's obsession with the outrageous, the low, and the lewd was intimately bound to poetry, Bloch forces a revision of traditional approaches to Old French literature. His final chapter, on castration anxiety, fetishism, and the comic, links the fabliaux with the development of modern notions of the self and makes a case for the medieval roots of our own sense of humor.

    By far the most important source for the history of the late sixth century A.D., the History has never before been fully evaluated due to Theophylact's obscureand idiosyncratic style. The narrative concentrates on the acts of war that threatened the stability of the reign of Emperor Maurice (A.D. 582-602)--the Persian War and struggles with the Avar federation and the Slav tribes in the Balkans.

    'Hilary Spurling has done brilliantly ...Being both a scholar and a cook seems to be a rare combination than one might have expected' - Jane Grigson. 'Few cookery books are as important or as fascinating as this ...(Hilary Spurling's) scholarly and practical skills combined make the book much more than an antiquarian curiosity. It is a cookery book to use' - Victoria Glendinning, "The Times".'Hilary Spurling's research into Lady Fettiplace's family and background is stunning. She and her household do really come to life ...Hilary Spurling's pinpointing of her precise social standing and that of her intimates and acquaintances, of the kind of lives they led, consequently the kind of food they ate, the way it was prepared, preserved and so on, are all subjects of the greatest interest' - Elizabeth David.