Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period.From reviews of the first edition:“A magnificent scholarly achievement [and] a compelling read.”—Patricia Morrison, Financial Times“Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated. . . . Duffy’s analysis . . . carries conviction.”—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books“This book will afford enjoyment and enlightenment to layman and specialist alike.”—Peter Heath, Times Literary Supplement“[An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.”—Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal

    Yet he grew up to become the greatest English-speaking playwright in the world. Bard of Avon: The Story of William Shakespeare is both his story and that of a great art rediscovered in the modern world.Drama had been forgotten since the days of ancient Greece, but it reemerged in Elizabethan London with the building of the first modern theater. Its impact can still be imagined today. There were the theaters, open to the weather and featuring neither sets nor curtains, but equipped with dramatic special effects. There were the companies of actors--the leading men, the comedians, the boys who played women's roles--and the playwrights who gave them all lines to say.Best of all, there was William Shakespeare, who rubbed shoulders with noblemen and royalty as well as with the rowdy crowds at the foot of the stage. He was suspected of involvement in a treasonous rebellion, and his last play literally brought down the house when cannon effects set fire to the famous Globe theater and it burned to the ground.Award-winning collaborators Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema have once again created a feast of words and pictures to celebrate the life of a remarkable person from the pages of history: William Shakespeare, a man for all time."

    Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.

    Barks rescues them from obscurity and restores their author to her rightful place among the greatest mystical poets.

    In 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, he was last seen fighting at the city walls, but the actual circumstances of his death have remained surrounded in myth. In the years that followed it was said that he was not dead but sleeping - the 'immortal emperor' turned to marble, who would one day be awakened by an angel and drive the Turks out of his city and empire. Donald Nicol's book tells the gripping story of Constantine's life and death, and ends with an intriguing account of claims by reputed descendants of his family - some remarkably recent - to be heirs to the Byzantine throne.

    It opens with an excellent historical outline of Islamic Spain, divided into sections by period; each section is written by a leading scholar and followed by a discussion of the characteristic arts, architecture, fortifications, and so forth. The subsequent four articles on the Alhambra itself give the best analysis of the subject in English. The catalog is precisely reproduced, with photographs of the highest quality. That it collects in one volume artworks that are so widely dispersed is a major achievement, especially because there is no institute in Spain devoted to the art of the Islamic centuries. Designed for both scholar and lay reader, it is the most important volume to be produced on the subject and belongs in every art and academic library for its contribution to both history and art.

    With contributions by specialist authors and contemporary illustrations of royal heraldry and coats of arms, Antonia Fraser has edited a definitive and entertaining history of one of the most powerful monarchies in the world.

    This meticulously researched book recounts how the early sixteenth-century Reformers, steering a course between the old Latin rites on the one hand and the Anabaptist movement on the other, developed a baptismal service that they understood to be reformed according to Scripture. Hughes Oliphant Old's study shows the Reformed baptismal rite to be well thought out, pastorally sensitive, and theologically profound.

    

    The dramatic history of the Vikings: their invasion of parts of England and Normandy, their trade routes through Russia to Byzantium, their founding of a new republic in Iceland, and further explorations westward is legendary. Described here by scholars from fifteen countries and richly illustrated with superb examples of coins, gold and silver jewelry, manuscripts and maps, ships and weaponry, textiles and household objects, the Viking culture emerges as highly developed and complex. Their domestic resources of virtually unlimited supplies of fish and game, furs, wool, wood and iron, together with their skilled craftsmanship, refined artistic sensibilities, social and political organization, adventurousness and bravery, allowed the Vikings to make their influence felt all over Europe for almost 300 years. This book also tells the story of how the Scandinavian countries became Christian nations and entered into the full community of Christian Europe, receiving and giving to the civilization of Europe.

    DeVries' book covers arms, the introduction of armor, gunpowder, the use of fortifications, and naval weaponry, and does so while showing how medieval military technology is connected in broader ways to medieval society.

    Crusades continued for three centuries over a vast area stretching from Morocco to Russia and played an important role in the politics and society of late medieval Europe. The first study to focus in depth on the later crusades, this book explores with clarity and insight developments in all the areas touched by crusading activity. Housley examines the evolution of the international military orders and the Christian frontier states associated with crusading, focusing especially on Greece and Cyprus. Illuminating the massive range and energy of the crusading movement in the late middle ages, he reveals the formidable problems which, as the period progressed, increasingly doomed crusades to failure, and shows how practical crusading was in a condition of decay before the Reformation destroyed the religious framework in which it had once flourished.

    Stephen Kruger studies the development of theories of dreaming, from the Neoplatonic and patristic writers to late medieval re-interpretations, and shows how these theories relate to autobiographical accounts and to more popular treatments of dreaming. He considers previously neglected material including one important dream vision by Nicole Oresme, and arrives at a new understanding of this literary genre, and of medieval attitudes to dreaming in general.

    Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.

    Myths, king-lists, place-names, sagas, palaces, belt-buckles, middens and graves are all grist to the archaeologist's mill. This book celebrates the anniversary of the discovery of that most famous burial at Sutton Hoo. Fifty years ago this great treasure, now in the British Museum, was unearthed from the centre of a ninety-foot-long ship buried on remote Suffolk heathland. Included in this volume are 23 wide-ranging essays on the Age of Sutton Hoo and director Martin Carver's summary of the latest excavations, which represent the current state of knowledge about this extraordinary site. That it still has secrets to reveal is shown by the last-minute discovery of a striking burial of a young noble with his horse and grave goods. M.O.H. CARVER is Professor of Archaeology at York University, and Director of the Sutton Hoo Research Project.

    Key figures from church history (Augustine, Patrick, Francis) as well as kings, knights, and travellers are covered with lots of suggestions for supplemental books and activities.Make sure you get the Greenleaf version of Famous Men of the Middle Ages. Its the only one that includes the five new chapters (on Augustine, Patrick, Francis, Dominic, etc) written by Rob Shearer and added to the original 1904 edition.