AD 539-594) is a fascinating exploration of the events that shaped sixth-century France. This volume contains all ten books from the work, the last seven of which provide an in-depth description of Gregory's own era, in which he played an important role as Bishop of Tours. With skill and eloquence, Gregory brings the age vividly to life, as he relates the exploits of missionaries, martyrs, kings and queens - including the quarrelling sons of Lothar I, and the ruthless Queen Fredegund, third wife of Chilperic. Portraying an age of staggering cruelty and rapid change, this is a powerful depiction of the turbulent progression of faith at a time of political and social chaos.

    A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to re-tame this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.

    Here are fascinating insights, based on Pernoud's sound knowledge and extensive experience as an archivist at the French National Archives. The book will be provocative for the general readers as well as a helpful resource for teachers.Scorned for centuries, although lauded by the Romantics, these thousand years of history have most often been concealed behind the dark clouds of ignorance: Why, didn't godiche (clumsy, oafish) come from gothique (Gothic)? Doesn't fuedal refer to the most hopeless obscurantism? Isn't Medieval applied to dust-covered, outmoded things?Here the old varnish is stripped away and a thousand years of history finally emerge—the "Middle Ages" are dead, long live the Middle Ages!

    What did they have in common? For a while they were crowned in gold, cosseted in silk, and flattered by courtiers. But in the end, they spent long nights in dark prison towers and were marched to the scaffold where they surrendered their heads to the executioner. And they are hardly alone in their undignified demises. Throughout history, royal women have had a distressing way of meeting bad ends—dying of starvation, being burned at the stake, or expiring in childbirth while trying desperately to produce an heir. They always had to be on their toes and all too often even devious plotting, miraculous pregnancies, and selling out their sisters was not enough to keep them from forcible consignment to religious orders. From Cleopatra (suicide by asp), to Princess Caroline (suspiciously poisoned on her coronation day), there's a gory downside to being blue-blooded when you lack a Y chromosome.Kris Waldherr's elegant little book is a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of queens across the ages, a quirky, funny, utterly macabre tribute to the dark side of female empowerment. Over the course of fifty irresistibly illustrated and too-brief lives, Doomed Queens charts centuries of regal backstabbing and intrigue. We meet well-known figures like Catherine of Aragon, whose happy marriage to Henry VIII ended prematurely when it became clear that she was a starter wife—the first of six. And we meet forgotten queens like Amalasuntha, the notoriously literate Ostrogoth princess who overreached politically and was strangled in her bath. While their ends were bleak, these queens did not die without purpose. Their unfortunate lives are colorful cautionary tales for today's would-be power brokers—a legacy of worldly and womanly wisdom gathered one spectacular regal ruin at a time.

    The Golden Bough" describes our ancestors' primitive methods of worship, sex practices, strange rituals and festivals. Disproving the popular thought that primitive life was simple, this monumental survey shows that savage man was enmeshed in a tangle of magic, taboos, and superstitions. Revealed here is the evolution of man from savagery to civilization, from the modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs to the entry of lasting moral, ethical, and spiritual values.

    A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from the acclaimed author of "Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe" ("Superb . . . A first-rate historical page turner"--"The New York Times")--comes the first fully authoritative biography of one of the most enchanting figures in world history. In this masterly work, Marco Polo's incredible odyssey--along the Silk Road and through all the fantastic circumstances of his life--is chronicled in sumptuous and illuminating detail. We meet him as a callow young man, the scion of a wealthy Venetian merchant family, only seventeen when he sets out in 1271 with his father and uncle on their journey to Asia. We see him gain the confidence of Kublai Khan, the world's most feared and powerful leader, and watch him become a trusted diplomat and intelligence agent in the ruler's inner circle. We are privy to his far-flung adventures on behalf of the Khan, living among the Mongols and other tribes, and traveling to magical cities, some far advanced over the West. We learn the customs of the Khan's court, both erotic and mercantile, and Polo's uncanny ability to adapt to them. We follow him on his journey back to Venice, laden with riches, the latest inventions, and twenty-four years' worth of extraordinary tales. And we see his collaboration with the famed writer Rustichello of Pisa, who immediately saw in Polo the story of a lifetime; enlivened by his genius for observation, Polo's tales needed little embellishment. Recorded by Rustichello as the two languished as prisoners of war in a Genoese jail, the" Travels" would explode the notion of non-Europeans as untutored savages and stand as the definitive description of China until the nineteenth century. Drawing on original sources in more than half a dozen languages, and on his own travels along Polo's route in China and Mongolia, Bergreen explores the lingering controversies surrounding Polo's legend, settling age-old questions and testing others for significance. Synthesizing history, biography, and travelogue, this is the timely chronicle of a man who extended the boundaries of human knowledge and imagination. Destined to be the definitive account of its subject for decades to come, "Marco Polo" takes us on a journey to the limits of history--and beyond.

    Like everything he writes, it is new, stimulating and sparkles like champagne.Braudel's technique, it has been said, is that of a pointilliste. Myriads of separate details, sharp glimpses of reality experienced by real people, are seen miraculously to orchestrate themselves into broad rhythms that underlie and transcend the excitements and struggles of particular periods. Braudel sees the past as we see the present — only in a longer perspective and over a wider field.The perspective is that of the possible, of the actual material limitations to human life in any given time or place. It is the every¬day, the habitual — the obvious that is so obvious it has hitherto been neglected by historians — that Braudel claims for a new and vast and enriching province of history. Food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and, above all, the growth of towns, that powerful agent of social and economic development, are described in all the richness and complexity of real life.The intensely visual quality of Braudel's understanding of history is brought into sharper focus by the remarkable series of illustrations that of themselves would make this book incomparableFERNAND BRAUDEL was born in 1902, received a degree in history in 1923, and subsequently taught in Algeria, Paris and Sao Paulo. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, during which time he wrote his grand thesis, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which was published in 1949. In 1946 he became a member of the editorial board of Annates, the famous journal founded by Marc Bloch and Lucian Febvre, whom he succeeded at the College de France in 1949. He has been a member of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and since 1962 has been chief administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Professor Braudel holds honorary doctor¬ates from universities all over the world.Jacket painting: Detail from Breughel the Elder's The Fall of Icarus, from the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. (Giraudon)"Braudel deserves a Nobel Prize. . . . [This is] the most remarkable picture of human life in the centuries before the human condition was radically changed by the growth of industry that has yet been presented. A book of great originality, a masterpiece."—J. H. Plumb, The Washington Post"Braudel's books enthrall. ... He is brilliant in demonstrating how most history is written on the backs of most people."—John Leonard, The New York Times"Even a preliminary glance at The Structures of Everyday Life shows a book that has no obvious compeer either in scope of reference or level of accessibility to the general reader. ... Its broad authority remains deeply impressive."—Richard Holmes, Harper's"Here is vast erudition, beautifully arranged, presented with grace of style, with humility before life's complexity and warm humanist feeling. Braudel's subject is nothing less than every¬day life all over the world before the industrial revolution.... He succeeds triumphantly in his first purpose: 'if not to see everything, at least to locate everything, and on the requisite world scale.'"—Angus Calder, The Standard"On neither side of the Atlantic does there live a man or woman with so much knowledge of the past as Braudel, or with a greater sense of its aptness to the intellectual occasion in hand....You can't pick up this big fat book without having your attention transfixed by something or other, if only the great gallery of pictures. They are a masterpiece in themselves."—Peter Laslett, The Guardian"This new book is unarguably a brilliant survey of demog¬raphy, urbanisation, transport, technology, food, clothing, housing, money and business, social classes, state power and international trade in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries."—Theodore Zeldin, The Listener-----By examining in detail the material life of preindustrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns.

    But as these Norse warriors left their northern strongholds to trade, raid, and settle across wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic, their violent and predatory culture left a unique imprint on medieval history. So much so that, by 1200, the Viking homelands had become an integral part of Latin Christendom. Northmen tells this story.Focusing on key events, such as the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 and the murder of the saga-writer Snorri Sturluson in 1241, in authoritative and compelling prose, medieval history expert Dr. John Haywood tells the extraordinary story of the Viking Age shedding light on the causes, impact, and eventual decline of Viking seafaring.

    As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, “No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.” Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.Then, in 1857, Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Company’s own Indian troops, thereby transforming an army mutiny into the largest uprising any empire had to face in the entire course of the nineteenth century. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: one of the most horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the British took the city—securing their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety years—tens of thousands more Indians were executed, including all but two of Zafar’s sixteen sons. By the end of the four-month siege, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and Zafar was sentenced to exile in Burma. There he died, the last Mughal ruler in a line that stretched back to the sixteenth century.Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work—the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi—and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

    Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. But statistics can’t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence.In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.

    He’s had a pretty bad press: supposed usurper of Richard II’s crown and the focus of hatred in the Peasants’ Revolt (they torched his home, the Savoy Palace). Helen Carr will paint a complex portrait of a man who held the levers of power on the English and European stage, passionately upheld chivalric values, pressed for the Bible to be translated into English, patronised the arts … and, if you follow Shakespeare, gave the most beautiful oration on England (‘this sceptred isle… this blessed plot’). An engrossing drama of political machinations, violence, romance and tragedy played out at the cusp of a new era.