On the Seventh Crusade, Sir Alec Summerlin makes a horrible mistake that costs him everything. Once the greatest swordsman in the realm, he lays his weapon down and refuses to ever wield a broadsword again. Surrendering his spurs, he retires to his father's castle in self-imposed exile. His father, however, has other ideas for his greatest son and betroths him to a local ale heiress. The Lady Peyton de Fluornoy is as resistant to marriage as Alec is, but she gradually begins to warm to the man who has given up on life. Alec comes to know a lady of spirit, beauty and intelligence. Before their marriage can happen, however, Alec's father is blackmailed by a neighbor who wants Peyton for his own son. Now deeply in love, Alec elopes with Peyton and an entirely new world of danger and passion opens up for them both. As the conflict with the neighbor heats up, deep and horrific secrets are revealed, and Peyton ends up in grave danger. Alec must recant his vow and draw his sword again to save the woman that he loves as The Legend is once again reborn.

    . . . All of this he recounts in a style that consistently entertains." --The New York Times Book Review In this magisterial adaptation of his epic three-volume history of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich chronicles the world's longest-lived Christian empire. Beginning with Constantine the Great, who in a.d. 330 made Christianity the religion of his realm and then transferred its capital to the city that would bear his name, Norwich follows the course of eleven centuries of Byzantine statecraft and warfare, politics and theology, manners and art.In the pages of A Short History of Byzantium we encounter mystics and philosophers, eunuchs and barbarians, and rulers of fantastic erudition, piety, and degeneracy. We enter the life of an empire that could create some of the world's most transcendent religious art and then destroy it in the convulsions of fanaticism. Stylishly written and overflowing with drama, pathos, and wit, here is a matchless account of a lost civilization and its magnificent cultural legacy."Strange and fascinating . . . filled with drollery and horror."                          --Boston Globe

    He soon has a passionate night with Monday, a young girl in Hervi's guardianship, that leaves her pregnant and betrayed. By chance the two meet years later and must face the wrath of unexpected adversaries.

    

    The British Library boasts the world's finest collection of medieval manuscripts, and in this new and lavishly illustrated survey, Janet Backhouse draws on these collections to provide a comprehensive introduction to these exciting and colourful materials.The manuscripts featured include bestiaries, psalters, Bibles, books of hours, and medical and herbal collections that originated in workrooms as geographically diverse as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria and the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. There is also a great chronological diversity among the selected manuscripts, with examples ranging from the seventh century AD and the Lindisfarne Gospels to early Renaissance offerings.Each of the almost 220 illluminations presented are accompanied by a caption and have been reproduced in colour. Many of the immages chosen have been reproduced here for the first time.

    400 and 1400. The book is arranged in two parts: the first surveys the comparative modes of thought and varying success of Byzantine, Latin-Christian, and Muslim cultures, and the second takes the reader from the eleventh-century revival of learning to the high Middle Ages and beyond, the period in which the vibrancy of Western intellectual culture enabled it to stamp its imprint well beyond the frontiers of Christendom.Marcia Colish argues that the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition were laid in the Middle Ages and not, as is commonly held, in the Judeo-Christian or classical periods. She contends that Western medieval thinkers produced a set of tolerances, tastes, concerns, and sensibilities that made the Middle Ages unlike other chapters of the Western intellectual experience. She provides astute descriptions of the vernacular and oral culture of each country of Europe; explores the nature of medieval culture and its transmission; profiles seminal thinkers (Augustine, Anselm, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Ockham); studies heresy from Manichaeism to Huss and Wycliffe; and investigates the influence of Arab and Jewish writing on scholasticism and the resurrection of Greek studies. Colish concludes with an assessment of the modes of medieval thought that ended with the period and those that remained as bases for later ages of European intellectual history.

    Eschewing questions of style, it focuses instead on the painting as a framed, transportable and marketable object that is a specifically modern artistic medium. Arguing that panel painting, from its origins in the Early Renaissance, was a self-aware image, Stoichita demonstrates that the artists and his art were often the theme of the painting. The also examines the mirror effect and other splitting strategies such as the mise en abime and intertextual play. By analyzing these modalities of self-reflection, Stoichita offers a view of a period and the art it produced once considered to have been definitively classified.

    The Medieval Messenger depicts in lurid detail the terrors and triumphs of the Middle Ages. '

    This prodigious national epic, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between 980 and 1010 AD, tells the story of ancient Persia, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing forward to the Arab-Islamic invasion in the 7th century. The Lion and the Throne covers the first third of the Shahnameh and will be followed by two volumes to complete the epic. Brilliantly translated and magnificently illustrated, these volumes give English-language readers access to a world of vanished wonders. The origins of civilisation... the notion of kingship... tenderness, a longing for justice, and social order... the first kings felled by foolish pride... demons on the throne... spiritual heroes and their martial virtues... mythical birds... romance and passion-these are some of the threads woven together to form the rich tapestry of ancient Persia. The tales in this volume were selected and retold in Persian prose by the renowned scholar, Ehsan Yarshater. Translator Dick Davis combines his skills as a poet and a Ferdowsi scholar to evoke the metrical musi

    Despite the recent spate of murders, each day he braves the dark woods to visit his friend, a mysterious hermit who shows him many strange and beautiful things. Though enthralled, the boy is always puzzled by his lessons with the hermit - never more so than the night the villagers hunt the hermit down, and burn him, believing him to be responsible for the many deaths.THE ROSE DEMON explores Matthias's unique relationship with a spirit he strives to placate but ultimately flees from. His story is played out against the vivid panorama of medieval life: the fall and sack of Constantinople; the turbulent Wars of the Roses; the terror of witchcraft; the battlefields of Spain and finally the lush jungles of the Caribbean where the Rose Demon and Matthias have one final, dramatic confrontation.

    Including 100 examples of hand-coloured medieval and Renaissance illumination from around Europe, this work presents translations of key texts and explanations of the cultural significance of Books of Hours.

    Given analyzes the inquisition in one French region in order to develop a sociology of medieval politics. Established in the early thirteenth century to combat widespread popular heresy, inquisitorial tribunals identified, prosecuted, and punished heretics and their supporters. The inquisition in Languedoc was the best documented of these tribunals because the inquisitors aggressively used the developing techniques of writing and record keeping to build cases and extract confessions.Using a Marxist and Foucauldian approach, Given focuses on three inquiries: what techniques of investigation, interrogation, and punishment the inquisitors worked out in the course of their struggle against heresy; how the people of Languedoc responded to the activities of the inquisitors; and what aspects of social organization in Languedoc either facilitated or constrained the work of the inquisitors. Punishments not only inflicted suffering and humiliation on those condemned, he argues, but also served as theatrical instruction for the rest of society about the terrible price of transgression. Through a careful pursuit of these inquires, Given elucidates medieval society's contribution to the modern apparatus of power.

    This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, A Beowulf Handbook will be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

    This book proposes a new view, through a case study of the Goths of Italy between 489 and 554. The author suggests wholly new ways of understanding barbarian groups and the end of the Western Roman Empire. The book also proposes a complete reinterpretation of the evolution of Christian conceptions of community, and of so-called Germanic Arianism.

    Joanne Findon analyses the representation of Emer, the wife of the great Irish hero Cu Chulainn, in four linked medieval Irish tales, and discusses Emer's ability to use powerful, effective words to change her fictional world and the audience's reading of that fictional world.A Woman's Words considers Emer as a literary figure rather than a mythic archetype or a reflection of a pre-Christian Celtic goddess. Emer and the narratives she inhabits are discussed as literary constructs, and are considered within the historical and legal milieu in which these tales were told, recorded, and read. Findon places Emer within the wider context of medieval literature in general as an unusual and compelling example of a heroic secular woman, married and fully integrated into her aristocratic society and yet capable of speaking out against its abuses. Her freedom to speak and be heard is remarkable in the light of prevalent later medieval impulses to silence women.By employing speech act theory to analyse Emer's discourse, and by viewing and interpreting the texts through the lens of current feminist criticism, Joanne Findon seeks to bring Middle Irish literature into the arena of current debates, particularly among feminist medievalists, and to offer a new approach to reading female characters in medieval Irish literature.

    This tabloid-style work contains illustrations and photographs, which help present a wealth of accurate historical material in an irresistible fashion.

    In 1140 he set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The poems of ON THE SEA, braiding scriptural quotation and a more personal voice, record the poet's perilous voyage to Alexandria, from whence Halevi would depart for Jerusalem -on which voyage he disappeared.

    The crown would go to the man who married her, and after to her son.But Melisende was a strong woman; the law that forced her to marry instead of taking the crown in her own name was a thorn in her side. It was she who ruled the City and who juggled the politics of church and court. The knights of Jerusalem fought in her honor, many of the best sworn to her personal service. She would not submit easily to a husband's rule, nor for long.

    It also uncovers the considerable art of warfare in this period, the high level of craftsmanship achieved in the manufacture of all forms of embellished helmets and swords.

    Full color.

    The reader is Transported by this congenial translation into the sphere of Absolute Beauty, and overwhelming Divine Love".

    The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the 12th and the 17th centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. They include Margery Kempe and the medieval visionaries, Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent), the Reformation martyr Anne Askew and other godly women described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and Lady Eleanor Davies as an example of a woman prophet of the Civil War. The uncertainties surrounding their words and their dissemination are analyzed, and the strategies women devised to be heard and read are exposed, showing that through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of their times; the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak autonomously and publicly.

    Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity. Setting the drawings and related imagery—manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork—within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.

    Geary's highly acclaimed collection of source materials on the medieval period. (A single-volume format of the complete text is also available.)As before, four principles guide the selection of materials. First, entire documents are included wherever possible, not snippets. Second, texts are grouped to form dossiers in which the individual documents relate to one another, reflecting the practice of historians themselves. Third, most of the documents chosen have been the subject of significant scholarship. And fourth, raw material for many types of historical investigations is provided: the documents are equally useful to the political historian, the social historian, the cultural historian or the historian of mentalities.The third edition includes an updated Preface, more extensive material from Gregory of Tours, and a new section, The Iberian Peninsula, containing material that deals with Jews, Muslims, and Heretics. The format of Readings in Medieval History has also been altered to make it more user-friendly. Volume I: The Early Middle Ages includes documents written up to the early 12th century; Volume II: The Later Middle Ages includes documents from the late 11th century on.

    A useful prologue offers students guidance in analyzing both written and visual primary sources.

    What moved them to go? What preparations did they need to make? How did they react to their experiences? This book comes up with detailed answers to these questions, and offers the first systematic reading of a large cache of contemporary source material. The author identifies family clusters of crusaders across Europe, whose collective commitment manifested itself in support for the new settlements in the East.

    Michael Solomon argues that these works gain their persuasive force by linking concerns over health and illness with men's behavior toward women. Solomon shows how the demonization of women in medieval society was more than vaguely cultural; it was a legitimate aspect of the healing arts, considered vital to the well-being of men.

    To coincide with the publication of Volume II and the completion of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, a boxed set of all three volumes will be available from May 1997. It will provide an illustrated and accessible guide to medieval society, from 350 to 1520.

    Each section opens with at least one selection from a classical philosopher, and there are many points at which the readings chosen refer to other works that the reader will also find in this collection. There is a considerable amount of material from central figures such as Augustine, Abelard, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, as well as extensive texts from thinkers in the medieval Islamic world. Each selection is prefaced by a brief introduction by the editors, providing a philosophical and religious background to help make the material more accessible to the reader. This edition, updated throughout, contains a substantial new chapter on medieval psychology and philosophy of mind, with texts from authors not previously represented such as John Buridan and Peter John Olivi.

    The work is written from the point of view of a religious dissident, a Monophysite, whose personal experience as a persecuted monk in his native Mesopotamia, as well as his later life in Constantinople, make the History a most interesting and unusual source.

    The transmission of this style to Anglo-Saxon England is illustrated by many Anglo-Latin, Old and Middle English texts from the 7th century to the 12th. By recovering conventions of encoding dates and self-reference the author identifies the origins of texts previously anonymous, including the patron, the poet, the recipient, and the date of presentation of the oldest English epic poem, Beowulf.

    A series of essays on the Lollards, a religious movement founded by John Wycliffe in the late 14th century, which scrutinises the relationship between Lollardy and the nobility, based on the proceedings of a conference held in Cambridge in 1995.

    

    In covering the period from the end of the Roman Empire and the late 12th century, the author is able to trace, in post-Conquest society, the continuing influence of developments which originated in Anglo-Saxon England.

    Based on sermons, reform ordinances, devotional treatises and especially catechisms, the book explores the programs developed by reformers and codified in works of religious indoctrination designed to fashion godly fathers (real and metaphorical) in home, church, and body politic. The chief product of this program, argues the author, was an ethos of social discipline that permeated the institutions of each major confession, with government gradually empowered to reach more deeply than ever before into the lives of its subjects.

    Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas Volume 1 and Volume 2.