History of the World Christian Movement shows that from the beginning Christianity has been a world religion, informed and shaped through the interplay of gospel and culture church and world.

    Fully armored and mounted on a magnificent charger, he seems invincible. Honor and glory await him as, guided by the chivalric code, he fights with lance and sword.This carefully researched yet entertaining book provides all the essential information you need to become a successful knight in the later Middle Ages, during the period of the Hundred Years’ War. Should you go on a Crusade? Which order of chivalry might you consider joining? What is required when you go through the ceremony of knighthood?Here are the answers to these and many more questions plus practical advice on topics such as equipment, fighting methods, and the conventions of warfare. But the knightly life is not all battles and sieges: there are also tournaments and jousts to enjoy and the world of courtly love.Based on contemporary lives and descriptions, this book—written by a leading medieval historian—paints a vivid picture of what it was like to be a medieval knight.

    Returning once again to Kingsbridge, England, A Column of Fire is the story of a country torn apart by religious intolerance. In 1558 England, Mary, Queen of Scots, who is better known as Bloody Mary is on the throne. She has ordered that all Protestants be murdered because of their religious beliefs. After her execution, her half sister, Elizabeth takes over the throne and promises to bring religious tolerance. Elizabeth is a Protestant, which turns all of Europe against England. Meanwhile, Ned Willard desperately wants to marry Margery Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, Ned is a Protestant while Margery is a Catholic, dooming their relationship.A Column of Fire by Ken Follett has become an international bestseller, as well as a number one bestseller for The New York Times. It has been called “absorbing” by The Washington Post.A Brief Look Inside:EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER than the surface of its pages. The characters and their world come alive, and the characters and its world still live on. Conversation Starters is peppered with questions designed to bring us beneath the surface of the page and invite us into the world that lives on.These questions can be used to...Create Hours of Conversation:• Promote an atmosphere of discussion for groups• Foster a deeper understanding of the book• Assist in the study of the book, either individually or corporately• Explore unseen realms of the book as never seen beforeDisclaimer: This book you are about to enjoy is an independent resource meant to supplement the original book. If you have not yet read the original book, we encourage doing before purchasing this unofficial Conversation Starters.

    And the McKennas, fresh from Ireland, have no intention of being victims. When Nolan McKenna and his sisters arrived unannounced on Cissie Cassidy's doorstep claiming to be her late husband's long-lost relatives, the lonely widow is all too willing to be taken in and trusting enough to help them find them a foothold in the city. While Nolan wields a shovel for twelve back-breaking hours a day, the beautiful, trusting Clare takes up with the wrong man instead of the collection agent who yearns to make her his bride. Sharp-witted and pretty, Evie is made of more ambitious stuff and uses her job behind the bar of the Harp of Erin to attract the attentions of Russell Blackstock, builder and land-speculator, who owns half the tenements on Clydeside - and plans to own still more. The worlds of the wealthy Blackstocks and the penniless McKennas are set on a collision course that will mean huge changes for them, and for the city they live in.

    And while it has been often in the news, accurate and impartial information on the conflict has been nearly impossible to obtain. In The Cyprus Problem, James Ker-Lindsay--recently appointed as expert advisor to the UN Secretary-General's Special Advisor on Cyprus--offers an incisive, even-handed account of the conflict. Ker-Lindsay covers all aspects of the Cyprus problem, placing it in historical context, addressing the situation as it now stands, and looking toward its possible resolution. The book begins with the origins of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities as well as the other indigenous communities on the island (Maronites, Latin, Armenians, and Gypsies). Ker-Lindsay then examines the tensions that emerged between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots after independence in 1960 and the complex constitutional provisions and international treaties designed to safeguard the new state. He pays special attention to the Turkish invasion in 1974 and the subsequent efforts by the UN and the international community to reunite Cyprus. The book's final two chapters address a host of pressing issues that divide the two Cypriot communities, including key concerns over property, refugee returns, and the repatriation of settlers. Ker-Lindsay concludes by considering whether partition really is the best solution, as many observers increasingly suggest.Written by a leading expert, The Cyprus Problem brings much needed clarity and understanding to a conflict that has confounded observers and participants alike for decades.

    The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-shipstransported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they not only raided but also traded, explored and settled new lands, encountered unfamiliar races, and embarked on pilgrimages and crusades.The Norsemen travelled to all corners of the medieval world and beyond; north to the wastelands of arctic Scandinavia, south to the politically turbulent heartlands of medieval Christendom, west across the wild seas to Greenland and the fringes of the North American continent, and east down theRussian waterways trading silver, skins, and slaves. Beyond the Northlands explores this world through the stories that the Vikings told about themselves in their sagas.But the depiction of the Viking world in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas goes far beyond historical facts. What emerges from these tales is a mixture of realism and fantasy, quasi-historical adventures, and exotic wonder-tales that rocket far beyond the horizon of reality. On the crackling brown pagesof saga manuscripts, trolls, dragons, and outlandish tribes jostle for position with explorers, traders, and kings.To explore the sagas and the world that produced them, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough now takes her own trip through the dramatic landscapes that they describe. Along the way, she illuminates the rich but often confusing saga accounts with a range of other evidence: archaeological finds, rune-stones, medieval world maps, encyclopaedic manuscripts, and texts from as far away as Byzantium and Baghdad. As her journey across the Old Norse world shows, by situating the sagas against the revealing background of this other evidence, we can begin at least to understand just how the world wasexperienced, remembered, and imagined by this unique culture from the outermost edge of Europe so many centuries ago.

    The count’s eldest daughter, Matilda, had refused William’s offer of marriage and publicly denounced him as a bastard. Encountering the young woman, William furiously dragged her to the ground by her hair and beat her mercilessly. Matilda’s outraged father immediately took up arms on his daughter’s behalf. But just a few days later, Baldwin was aghast when Matilda, still recovering from the assault, announced that she would marry none but William, since “he must be a man of great courage and high daring” to have ventured to “come and beat me in my own father’s palace.”   Thus began the tempestuous marriage of Matilda of Flanders and William the Conqueror. While William’s exploits and triumphs have been widely chronicled, his consort remains largely overlooked. Now, in her groundbreaking Queen of the Conqueror, acclaimed author and historian Tracy Borman weaves together a comprehensive and illuminating tapestry of this noble woman who stood only four-foot-two and whose role as the first crowned Queen of England had a large and lasting influence on the English monarchy.   From a wealth of historical artifacts and documents, Matilda emerges as passionate, steadfast, and wise, yet also utterly ruthless and tenacious in pursuit of her goals, and the only person capable of taming her formidable husband—who, unprecedented for the period, remained staunchly faithful to her. This mother of nine, including four sons who went on to inherit William’s French and English dominions, confounded the traditional views of women in medieval society by seizing the reins of power whenever she had the chance, directing her husband’s policy, and at times flagrantly disobeying his orders.   Tracy Borman lays out Matilda’s remarkable story against one of the most fascinating and transformative periods in European history. Stirring, richly detailed, and wholly involving, Queen of the Conqueror reveals not just an extraordinary figure but an iconic woman who shaped generations, and an era that cast the essential framework for the world we know today.

    

    If you've read Bitch, Bitch Reloaded, The Bitch Is Back, Queen Bitch and Last Bitch Standing, here is an opportunity to have this captivating saga in one book. If you're unfamiliar with the characters get ready to go on a thrilling ride of how one woman's determination took her from having nothing to gaining it all. This is where the journey began for Precious Cummings.The saga continues in Bitch A New Beginning with her daughter Aaliyah.

    is the latest blockbuster by Ireland's most respected crime writer and journalist, Paul Williams. Murder Inc. is the definitive account of how organized crime exploded in Limerick from the 1990s and in the noughties. It describes the depravity and decadence of the gangs, their deadly rivaliries, and their reigns of terror over the community in which they lived. Finally, Williams traces the faultlines that eventually led to the implosion of the gangs and their defeat.Drawing on his vast inside knowledge of the criminal underworld, an unparalleled range of contacts and eye witness interviews, Paul Williams provides a chilling insight into the mobsters and events that corroded entire neighbourhoods and devastated countless lives.

    Combining the best of what Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures had to offer, al-Andalus and its successors influenced the rest of Europe in dramatic ways, from the death of liturgical Latin and the spread of secular poetry, to remarkable feats in architecture, science, and technology. The glory of the Andalusian kingdoms endured until the Renaissance, when Christian monarchs forcibly converted, executed, or expelled non-Catholics from Spain. In this wonderful book, we can finally explore the lost history whose legacy is still with us in countless ways. Author Biography: María Rosa Menocal is R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and head of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She lives in New Haven, CT.

    Embries—better known as “Merlin”—informs a young captain that he is next in line to the throne. For James Arthur Stuart is not the commoner he has always believed himself to be—he is Arthur, the legendary King of Summer, reborn. But the road to England’s salvation is dangerous, with powerful enemies waiting in ambush. For Arthur is not the only one who has returned from the mists of legend. And Merlin’s magic is not the only sorcery that has survived the centuries.AVALON“A rousing postscript to Lawhead’s bardic Pendragon Cycle . . . Playing off snappy contemporary derring-do against the powerful shining glimpses of the historical Arthur he created, Lawhead pulls off a genuinely moving parable of good and evil.”—Publishers Weekly

    A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.

    Renowned Witch Silver RavenWolf presents magickal techniques--personally designed and tested by the author--that can help you get the upper hand on your cash flow. From inviting wealth into your home with Prosperity Floor Wash to invoking the elements for financial assistance, this beginner's guide to abundance magick is for anyone who has ever worried about money.

    Instead, she looks closely at some of the people who lived and worked in that fascinating era of European history.