His reign was one of the most dramatic and important of the entire Middle Ages, leading to war and conquest on an unprecedented scale, and leaving a legacy of division between the peoples of Britain that has lasted from his day to our own.Edward I is familiar to millions as ‘Longshanks’, conqueror of Scotland and nemesis of Sir William Wallace (‘Braveheart’). Yet this story forms only the final chapter of the king’s astonishingly action-packed life. Earlier Edward had defeated and killed the famous Simon de Montfort in battle; travelled across Europe to the Holy Land on crusade; conquered Wales, extinguishing forever its native rulers, and constructing – at Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris and Caernarfon – the most magnificent chain of castles ever created. He raised the greatest armies of the English Middle Ages, and summoned the largest parliaments; notoriously, he expelled all the Jews from his kingdom. The longest-lived of all England’s medieval kings, he fathered no fewer than fifteen children with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, and after her death he erected the Eleanor Crosses – the grandest funeral monuments ever fashioned for an English monarch.In this book, Marc Morris examines afresh the forces that drove Edward throughout his relentless career: his character, his Christian faith, and his sense of England’s destiny – a sense shaped in particular by the tales of the legendary King Arthur. He also explores the competing reasons that led Edward’s opponents (including Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and Robert Bruce) to resist him, and the very different societies that then existed in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The result is a sweeping story, immaculately researched yet compellingly told, and a vivid picture of medieval Britain at the moment when its future was decided.

    Based on a true story never before told and impeccably researched, this is a testament to the power of sacrifice and the strength of love. When Roger Bigod, heir to the powerful earldom of Norfolk, arrives at court to settle an inheritance, he meets Ida de Tosney, young mistress to King Henry II. In Roger, Ida sees a chance for lasting love, but their decision to marry carries an agonizing price. It's a breathtaking novel of making choices, not giving up, and coping with the terrible shifting whims of the king.

    Children and parents love the activities, ranging from cooking projects to crafts, board games to science experiments, and puzzles to projects.Each Story of the World Activity Book provides a full year of history study when combined with the Textbook, Audiobook, and Tests—each available separately to accompany each volume of The Story of the World Activity Book. Activity Book 2 Grade Recommendation: Grades 1-6.

    Filling a gap in the literature for an academically oriented volume on the Viking period, this unique book is a one-stop authoritative introduction to all the latest research in the field.Bringing together today's leading scholars, both established seniors and younger, cutting-edge academics, Stefan Brink and Neil Price have constructed the first single work to gather innovative research from a spectrum of disciplines (including archaeology, history, philology, comparative religion, numismatics and cultural geography) to create the most comprehensive Viking Age book of its kind ever attempted.Consisting of longer articles providing overviews of important themes, supported by shorter papers focusing on material of particular interest, this comprehensive volume covers such wide-ranging topics as social institutions, spatial issues, the Viking Age economy, warfare, beliefs, language, voyages, and links with medieval and Christian Europe.This original work, specifically oriented towards a university audience and the educated public, will have a self-evident place as an undergraduate course book and will be a standard work of reference for all those in the field.

    Nine centuries ago, when the dynamic energy of the Benedictine order was threatening to ossify into mere grandeur and formalism, the Cistercians returned to the original "holy rules" of Benedict of Nursia and working with their hands. The stone witnesses of this era include majestic monastic buildings. With their austere dignity and sublime absence of decoration, Cistercian ecclesiastical buildings came to stand for awe-inspiring spiritual clarity and purity. This volume presents masterpieces of Cistercian architecture in France, Great Britain, the German-speaking lands, Portugal, Spain and Italy. The text describes the development of the order and the life of Bernhard of Clairvaux. A selection of original texts, pictures and chronological tables offers information on the artistic and cultural-historical characteristics of the individual monasteries and their inhabitants. An impressive and inspiring oeuvre!

    In Rome, Pope Innocent III plots to crush a growing dualist sect that preaches Christ's mission has been corrupted. In the Holy Land, warrior-monks make a disturbing discovery. In southern France, roving troubadours sing of a Holy Grail that offers salvation through the intercession of a worthy lady.And in the foothills of the Pyrenees, war clouds approach Esclarmonde's hunted heretics, who protect an ancient scroll containing shattering revelations. Declared outlaws by the Church, the Occitan knights who defend Esclarmonde's family and followers determine to make their last stand atop Montsegur, a haunting mountain keep that protects a sacred treasure. Their heroic resistance against the papal and French armies evokes the legendary defiance of the Jewish rebels against the Roman legions at Masada.Myth and history collide in this sweeping saga of crusading fanaticism, courtly romance, knightly valor, and monastic conspiracy set during the infamous Albigensian Crusade.-- Foreword Book-of-the-Year Finalist/Honorable Mention Historical Fiction-- NIEA Award for Best New Fiction-- Nautilus Silver Award-- IPPY Silver Award-- Eric Hoffer Award Finalist/Honorable Mention-- Da Vinci Eye Award Finalist

    This text sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking the reader to the Middle Ages, and showing everything from the horrors of leprosy and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and haute couture.

    We still look to the stars today for answers to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? Will it end, and if so, how? What is our place within it? John North has been examining such questions for decades. In Cosmos, he offers a sweeping historical survey of the two sciences that help define our place in the universe: astronomy and cosmology.             Organizing his history chronologically, North begins by examining Paleolithic cave drawings that clearly chart the phases of the moon. He then investigates scientific practices in the early civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, and the Americas (among others), whose inhabitants developed sophisticated methods to record the movements of the planets and stars. Trade routes and religious movements, North notes, brought these ancient styles of scientific thinking to the attention of later astronomers, whose own theories—such as Copernicus’ planetary theory—led to the Scientific Revolution.             The work of master astronomers, including Ptolemy, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, is described in detail, as are modern-day developments in astrophysics, such as the advent of radio astronomy, the brilliant innovations of Einstein, and the many recent discoveries brought about with the help of the Hubble telescope. This new edition brings North’s seminal book right up to the present day, as North takes a closer look at last year’s reclassification of Pluto as a “dwarf” planet and gives a thorough overview of current research.            With more than two hundred illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, Cosmos is the definitive history of astronomy and cosmology. It is sure to find an eager audience among historians of science and astronomers alike.

    The essential visual guide to the warriors of the Middle Ages, this richly illustrated guide provides an overview of the medieval world and a guide to the typical battlefield and the armies that populated it.

    From the Battle of Hastings to the Wars of the Roses, this book tells the unique story of Medieval Britain.Full of intriguing facts, illustrations, photographs, detailed reconstructions, paintings, maps and family trees.Includes links to websites to find out more information via the Usborne Quicklinks Website as well as lists of places to visit throughout Britain.

    Using sources ranging from the writings of the famous twelfth-century female practitioner, Trota of Salerno, all the way to the great tomes of Renaissance male physicians, and covering both medicine and surgery, this study demonstrates that men slowly established more and more authority in diagnosing and prescribing treatments for women's gynecological conditions (especially infertility) and even certain obstetrical conditions.Even if their hands-on knowledge of women's bodies was limited by contemporary mores, men were able to establish their increasing authority in this and all branches of medicine due to their greater access to literacy and the knowledge contained in books, whether in Latin or the vernacular. As Monica Green shows, while works written in French, Dutch, English, and Italian were sometimes addressed to women, nevertheless even these were often re-appropriated by men, both by practitioners who treated women nd by laymen interested to learn about the secrets of generation.While early in the period women were considered to have authoritative knowledge on women's conditions (hence the widespread influence of the alleged authoress Trotula), by the end of the period to be a woman was no longer an automatic qualification for either understanding or treating the conditions that most commonly afflicted the female sex--with implications of women's exclusion from production of knowledge on their own bodies extending to the present day.

    Beginning in the 1380s in market towns along the Ijssel River of the east-central Netherlands and in the county of Holland, they formed households organized as communes and forged lives centered on private devotion. They lived on city streets alongside their neighbors, managed properties and rents in common, and worked in the textile and book trades, all the while refusing to profess vows as members of any religious order or to acquire spouses and personal property as lay citizens. They defended their self-designed style of life as exemplary and sustained it in the face of opposition, their women labeled beguines and their men lollards, both meant as derogatory terms. Yet the movement grew, drawing in women and schoolboys, priests and laymen, and spreading outward toward M�nster, Flanders, and Cologne.The Devout were arguably more culturally significant than the Lollards and Beguines, yet they have commanded far less scholarly attention in English. John Van Engen's magisterial book keeps the Modern Devout at its center and thinks through their story anew. Few interpreters have read the Devout so insistently within their own time and space by looking to the social and religious conditions that marked towns and parishes in northern Europe during the fifteenth century and examining the widespread upheavals in cultural and religious life between the 1370s and the 1440s. In Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, Van Engen grasps the Devout in their humanity, communities, and beliefs, and places them firmly within the urban societies of the Low Countries and the cultures we call late medieval.

    This lavishly illustrated history re-tells the story of the battle and Henry V's Normandy campaign from the perspective of the commander of the English archers, Sir Thomas Erpingham. Sir Thomas, an experienced warrior with military experience dating back 40 years is known for his brief but pivotal appearances in Shakespeare's Henry V, where he is correctly portrayed as an elderly, white haired veteran. At 57 he was one of the oldest there and a close personal confident of the King. But what was his background? How did he command his archers to such a place in history? And what role did the longbow and battlefield tactics play in the final analysis of victory?

    Filth in all its manifestations—material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung)—helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages. Applying fecal theories to late medieval culture, Morrison concludes by proposing Waste Studies as a new field of ethical and moral criticism for literary scholars.

    The ultimate book on King Arthur! Combining the best-known stories about Arthur and his court with fascinating research on who Arthur really was and where Camelot was built, and the relationships between the main characters in the legends, this magnificent edition has been designed and illustrated to the highest standards.

    With characteristic erudition and insight, Rémi Brague focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another. Their disparate philosophical worlds, Brague shows, were grounded in different models of revelation that engendered divergent interpretations of the ancient Greek sources they held in common. So, despite striking similarities in their solutions for the philosophical problems they all faced, intellectuals in each theological tradition often viewed the others’ ideas with skepticism, if not disdain. Brague’s portrayal of this misunderstood age brings to life not only its philosophical and theological nuances, but also lessons for our own time.

     Just a few months before, Suleyman's armies faced a humiliating retreat from the walls of Vienna. His troops are restless. The city is awash with spies and cut-throats. To top it all, the beautiful Shireen, Treasurer of the Imperial Harem dies in mysterious circumstances. As rumours of murder, intrigue and sexual depravity grip the city, Suleyman scrambles to deflect suspicion from his favourite, Khurrem. The Sultan turns to Adam Pasha, his Chief Justice. Before long, the scholarly judge finds himself caught in a sinister web of lies and deceit. Aided by Murat, his trusty Georgian steward, and Mikhail, a fast-rising palace physician, Adam sets about investigating Shireen's death. But neither the Sultan nor the Grand Vizier, Adam's erstwhile mentor, seem inclined to make matters easy. With the Harem off-limits, how can Adam conduct his investigation? Who will protect him from the inquisitorial and ruthless Grand Vizier, himself rumoured to be plotting to seize the throne? As he digs deeper, Adam Pasha discovers that the State is rotting at its core and his own life is in dire peril. Moving from the Topkapi Palace to the fish and naval docks at Galata, from the Covered Bazaar and the underground cisterns to the Sultan's hunting grounds, this is Istanbul as never seen before.

    In Italy from 1494 to 1529, for instance, France was involved in at least a hundred battles, some of them batttles of giants' like Marignano. After 1530, though the emphasis partly shifted away from Italy and major battles were replaced by complex sieges and wars of manoeuvre, the presence of war was universal. In the Habsburg Valois' wars that began in 1521, the country was subjected to major military incursions but continued to make notable attempts to occupy contiguous territory in the Pyrenees, the Alps and the north-east.Explaining such prodigious military efforts is the theme of this book. Why did the rulers of France attach so much importance to war and did the development of French armies in this period contribute to a significant modernisation of the country's military potential? The author attempts to answer these crucial questions, through an exploration of the strategy of the country's rulers in the light of contemporary writings, analysis of the nature of the country's high command, and a study of the major components of the king's armies. He argues that France was a society geared to war, persuaded by a sophisticated network of printed communications; the reception of the triumphalist view of war favoured by the rulers is discussed via an investigation of public opinion, as revealed in the literary, artistic and musical worlds. He also shows how the strengthening of the frontiers with new fortifications emerged as a major stage in the adaptation of France to age of artillery.DAVID POTTER is Reader in History at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

    The line between the scientific and the magical was blurred. According to popular lore, magicians of the Middle Ages were trained in the art of magic in "magician schools" located in various metropolitan areas, such as Naples, Athens, and Toledo. It was common knowledge that magic was learned and that cities had schools designed to teach the dark arts. The Spanish city of Toledo, for example, was so renowned for its magic training schools that "the art of Toledo" was synonymous with "the art of magic." Until Benedek L�ng's work on Unlocked Books, little had been known about the place of magic outside these major cities. A principal aim of Unlocked Books is to situate the role of central Europe as a center for the study of magic.L�ng helps chart for us how the thinkers of that day--clerics, courtiers, and university masters--included in their libraries not only scientific and religious treatises but also texts related to the field of learned magic. These texts were all enlisted to solve life's questions, whether they related to the outcome of an illness or the meaning of lines on one's palm. Texts summoned angels or transmitted the recipe for a magic potion. L�ng gathers magical texts that could have been used by practitioners in late fifteenth-century central Europe.

    Leading scholars examine not only the material cultures of domesticity, gender, and power relations within the household, but also how they were envisioned in texts, images, objects and architecture. Many of the essays argue that England witnessed the emergence of a distinctive bourgeois ideology of domesticity during the late Middle Ages. But the volume also contends that, although the world of the great lord was far removed from that of the artisan or peasant, these social groups all occupied physical structures that constituted homes in which people were drawn together by ties of kinship, service or neighbourliness. This pioneering study will appeal to scholars of medieval English society, literature and culture.

    Wall paintings are a unique art form, complementing, and yet distinctly separate from, other religious imagery in churches. Unlike carvings, or stained glass windows, their support was the structure itself, with the artist's `canvas' the very stone and plaster of the church. They were also monumental, often larger than life-size images for public audiences. Notwithstanding their dissimilarity from other religious art, wall paintings were also an integral part of church interiors, enhancing devotional imagery and inspiring faith and commitment in their own right, and providing an artistic setting for the church's sacred rituals and public ceremonies. This book brings together, often for the first time, many of the very best surviving examples of medieval church wall paintings. Using new technologies and many previously untried techniques, it allows us to visualize these images as the artists originally intended. The plates are accompanied by an authoritative and scholarly text, bringing the imagery and iconography of the medieval church vividly to life. ROGER ROSEWELL was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. A former journalist, he is a Director of a private European art foundation and the news editor of the online stained glass magazine, VIDIMUS.

    From the household of King John to the defenders of Elizabeth I, there was great change in the social standing of knights, their equipment and appearance, and their involvement in politics and warfare.An expert on Medieval military history Christopher Gravett describes how the knight evolved over four centuries of English and European history, the wars they fought, their lives in peacetime and on campaign, the weapons they fought with, the armor and clothing they wore and the fascinating code and mythology of chivalry. The text is richly illustrated with images ranging from manuscript illustrations to modern artwork reconstructions, and many photographs of historic artifacts and sites.

    Questions range from the purely factual (Did they wear jewellery?), to the more analytical (Why were there so many separate kingdoms?), and the controversial (What was Offa's Dyke for?). This is good fun and easy to dip into, and I for one am glad that at Anglo-Saxon Books at least "What is a peplos dress?" ranks as a frequently asked question.

    The era seems to sit uncomfortably between the remarkable achievements of church and society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the revivals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. The period has even been called a "Babylonian Captivity" for the Church, echoing the struggles of the Israelites in exile, and reflecting the transferral of the papacy to Avignon in 1309. Norman Tanner challenges this negative view, examining a vibrant period of ecclesiastical history in its own right rather than just through the lenses of the centuries that preceded and succeeded it. He discusses the trials of the age in the form of the papal schism between 1378-1417, the heresies of Cathars, Lollards and Hussites, the Hundred Years' War, and the terror of the Black Death. Yet he focuses, too, on the great ecumenical councils, the flowering of intellectual life in the Renaissance and the extraordinarily rich spirituality of mystics like Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart. What comes to light in this lively and readable volume is that the later medieval age was actually one of extraordinary achievement for the Church; one of deepening and enrichment, as well as of schism and conflict.