'Compulsively readable' (History), this is the first volume in a series that details the long and violent endeavour of the English to dismember Europe's strongest state, a succession of wars that is one of the seminal chapters in European history. Beginning with the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1328, it follows the Hundred Years War up to the surrender of Calais in 1347. It traces the early humiliations and triumphs of Edward III: the campaigns of Sluys, Crecy and Calais, which first made his name as a war leader and the reputation of his subjects as the most brutally effective warriors of their time. Trial by Battle is an account of the events of a pivotal period in both French and British history, from Wolfson History Prize-winning author and historian Jonathan Sumption. "A new and immensely impressive history of the war." (Daily Telegraph).

A biography of the 15th Century Prince of Romania, Vlad Dracula (1431-1476), nicknamed the Impale and on whom Bram Stoker based his fictional character. It covers his career as ruler of Wallachia, terror of Transylvania and crusader against the Turks and examines how closely he compares to his fictional counterpart. It shows 'Vlad the Impaler' to be a man as extraordinary in his political and crusading abilities as he was in his evil. Considered a hero by the Pope and his fellow Romanians whom he liberated from the Turks and generations of Russian Turks studied accounts of his political genius and used his regime as a model for their own. Yet despite all these things Vlad is remembered chiefly for his crimes, excessive in both nature and number. The 'Impaler' got his name for protecting his capital from the Turks by constructiong "a forest of the impaled". Only in the context of his times - a time of plague, the beginning of the Renaissance, of cut-throat politics and conflict between East and West - can one understand fully the many faces of Dracula. In this definitive biography covering Vlad Dracula's life and subsequent legend, readers will discover that life can truly be more terrifying than fiction.

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is a record not of a literal jouney but of a meditative journey across time and space into the medieval imagination. Using the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of the two locales as a starting point, Adams breathes life into what others might see merely as monuments of a past civilization. With daring and inventive conceits, Adams looks at the ordinary people, places, and events in the context of the social conventions and systems of thought and belief of the thirteenth century turning the study of history into a kind of theater.

As Raymond Carney discusses in his introduction, Adams' freeedom from the European traditions of study lends an exuberance--and puckish wit--to his writings.

The essays in this volume derive in the main, though not exclusively, from the 13th annual conference held in Houston in November 1994. Written by an international group of scholars, they centre on the history of England and its neighbours during the Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Anglo-Norman and Angevin periods. Of particular interest is a wide-ranging and well-illustrated article on medieval bridges; other topics include the Anglo-Norman patrons of Bury St Edmunds, Anglo-Welsh relations before 1066, the legal status of the Britons in seventh-century Wessex, and the Hundred Rolls. There is also a particular focus on the roles played by women, with articles on Henry I's queen Adeliza of Louvain, and the Anglo-Norman countesses of Chester.Dr C.P. LEWIS teaches in the Department of History at the University of Liverpool; Dr EMMA COWNIE teaches in the Department of History, King's College, London. Contents and Contributors: EMMA COWNIE, NICHOLAS BROOKS, LOUIS M. ALEXANDER, JOHNR.E. BLIESE, FREDERICK C. SUPPE, W. SCOTT JESSEE, H.B. TEUNIS, JULIE POTTER, LAURA WERTHEIMER, SUSAN JOHNS, R.H. HELMHOLZ, S.F.C. MILSOM, DAVID ROFFE.

Of all the great seafaring vessels of the Age of Discovery, not one has been recovered or even - given the lack of detailed contemporary descriptions - accurately represented. Then, in the mid-1990s, a sunken ship was found in a small, shallow gulf off the coast of Panama. Chronicling both dramatic history and present-day archaeological adventures, Klaus Brinkbaumer and Clemens Hoges reveal this artefact to be not only the oldest shipwreck ever recovered in the Western Hemisphere but also very likely the remains of the Vizcaina, one of the ships Christopher Columbus took on his last trip to the New World. "The Voyage of the Vizcaina" gives us an exciting tale of exploration and discovery, and the startling truths behind Columbus' final attempt to reach the East by going west.

What intellectual and practical tools did medieval peoples employ in situations of disorder? How did they attempt to maintain cultural stability? Arguing against the common notion of a static medieval society organized along kinship and feudal lines, the contributors to "Ordering Medieval Society"--among them some of Germany's most influential medieval historians--reveal the diverse egalitarian and hierarchical forms of organization that medieval societies used to forge group structure.In the book's first section, "Conceiving," the authors examine intellectual modes of ordering society. They study the different patterns of social classification in the Middle Ages, including the tripartite division between clergy, knights, and peasants. The medieval system of "counting piety" through quantifiable modes of penance provided another way to define social relations. The second part, "Transforming," focuses on times of disorder when social relations were reordered at once intellectually and practically. This section analyzes the transformation of political institutions in fifth-century Gaul in a shift from a Roman to a medieval ideology. Charting a much later institutional transformation, the book provocatively argues that the concept of "the nobility" is a fourteenth-century invention. The final section, "Stabilizing," considers mechanisms for the constitution of egalitarian groups and highly developed systems for conflict resolution in medieval group culture.Contributors: Gerd Althoff, Arnold Angenendt, Thomas Braucks, Rolf Busch, Bernhard Jussen, Thomas Lentes, Hubertus Lutterbach, Joseph Morsel, Otto Gerhard Oexle.

Each volume includes all the necessary materials for the comprehensive study of a work of art: An illustration section showing the complete work of art, details, preliminary studies, and iconographic sources; An introductory essay by the editor; Documents and literary sources; Critical essays from the art-historical literature.

Before France became France its territories included Occitania, roughly the present-day province of Languedoc. The city of Narbonne was a center of Occitanian commerce and culture during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For most of the second half of the twelfth century, that city and its environs were ruled by a remarkable woman, Ermengard, who negotiated her city's way through a maze of ever changing dynastic alliances. Fredric L. Cheyette's masterful and beautifully illustrated book is a biography of an extraordinary warrior woman and of a unique, vulnerable, doomed society Ermengard roamed Occitania receiving oaths of fidelity, negotiating treaties, set thing disputes among the lords of her lands, and camping with her armies before the walls of besieged cities. She was born into a world of politics and warfare, but from the Mediterranean to the North Sea her name echoed in songs that treated the arts of love.

Proposing that people lived (and live) in "emotional communities" each having its own particular norms of emotional valuation and expression Barbara H. Rosenwein here discusses some instances from the Early Middle Ages. Drawing on extensive microhistorical research, as well as cognitive and social constructionist theories of the emotions, Rosenwein shows that different emotional communities coexisted, that some were dominant at times, and that religious beliefs affected emotional styles even as those styles helped shape religious expression.

This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions. Rosenwein explores the character of emotional communities as discovered in several case studies: the funerary inscriptions of three different Gallic cities; the writings of Pope Gregory the Great; the affective world of two friends, Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus; the Neustrian court of Clothar II and his heirs; and finally the tumultuous period of the late seventh century. In this essay, the author presents a new way to consider the history of emotions, inviting others to continue and advance the inquiry.

For medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the modern world, the book will be of interest for its persuasive critique of Norbert Elias's highly influential notion of the "civilizing process." Rosenwein's notion of emotional communities is one with which all historians and social scientists working on the emotions will need to contend."

"The enigmatic link between the natural and artistic beauty that is to be contemplated but not eaten, on the one hand, and the eucharistic beauty that is both seen (with the eyes of faith) and eaten, on the other, intrigues me and inspires this book. One cannot ask theo-aesthetic questions about the Eucharist without engaging fundamental questions about the relationship between beauty, art (broadly defined), and eating." from Eating BeautyIn a remarkable book that is at once learned, startlingly original, and highly personal, Ann W. Astell explores the ambiguity of the phrase "eating beauty." The phrase evokes the destruction of beauty, the devouring mouth of the grave, the mouth of hell. To eat beauty is to destroy it. Yet in the case of the Eucharist the person of faith who eats the Host is transformed into beauty itself, literally incorporated into Christ. In this sense, Astell explains, the Eucharist was "productive of an entire 'way' of life, a virtuous life-form, an artwork, with Christ himself as the principal artist." The Eucharist established for the people of the Middle Ages distinctive schools of sanctity Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian whose members were united by the eucharistic sacrament that they received. Reading the lives of the saints not primarily as historical documents but as iconic expressions of original artworks fashioned by the eucharistic Christ, Astell puts the "faceless" Host in a dynamic relationship with these icons. With the advent of each new spirituality, the Christian idea of beauty expanded to include, first, the marred beauty of the saint and, finally, that of the church torn by division an anti-aesthetic beauty embracing process, suffering, deformity, and disappearance, as well as the radiant lightness of the resurrected body. This astonishing work of intellectual and religious history is illustrated with telling artistic examples ranging from medieval manuscript illuminations to sculptures by Michelangelo and paintings by Salvador Dali. Astell puts the lives of medieval saints in conversation with modern philosophers as disparate as Simone Weil and G. W. F. Hegel."

Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the pre-history of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as a saint infused with the spirit of God and whom to avoid as a demoniac possessed of an unclean spirit. This process of discrimination, known as the discernment of spirits, was central to the religious culture of Western Europe between 1200 and 1500. indistinguishable, a highly ambiguous set of bodily features and behaviours were carefully scrutinized by observers. Attempts to make decisions about individuals who exhibited supernatural powers were complicated by the fact that the most intense exemplars of lay spirituality were women, and the fragile sex was deemed especially vulnerable to the snares of the devil. Assessments of women's spirit possessions often oscillated between divine and demonic interpretations. Ultimately, although a few late medieval women visionaries achieved the prestige of canonization, many more were accused of possession by demons. Caciola analyzes a broad array of sources from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts, to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

Russia's ever-expanding imperial boundaries encompassed diverse peoples and religions. Yet Russian Orthodoxy remained inseparable from the identity of the Russian empire-state, which at different times launched conversion campaigns not only to "save the souls" of animists and bring deviant Orthodox groups into the mainstream, but also to convert the empire's numerous Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, and Uniates.

This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building. How successful were the Church and the state in proselytizing among religious minorities? How were the concepts of Orthodoxy and Russian nationality shaped by the religious diversity of the empire? What was the impact of Orthodox missionary efforts on the non-Russian peoples, and how did these peoples react to religious pressure? In chapters that explore these and other questions, this book provides geographical coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.

The editors' introduction and conclusion place the twelve original essays in broad historical context and suggest patterns in Russian attitudes toward religion that range from attempts to forge a homogeneous identity to tolerance of complexity and diversity.

Contributors Eugene Clay, Arizona State University; Robert P. Geraci, University of Virginia; Sergei Kan, Dartmouth College; Agnes Kefeli, Arizona State University; Shoshana Keller, Colgate University; Michael Khodarkovsky, Loyola University, Chicago; John D. Klier, University College, London; Georg Michels, University of California, Riverside; Firouzeh Mostashari, Regis College; Dittmar Schorkowitz, Free University, Berlin; Theodore Weeks, Southern Illinois University; Paul W. Werth, University of Nevada, Las Vegas"

B. Netanyahu, one of the world's foremost medievalists, has made a lifelong project of studying the historical evolution of Marranism and seeking to ascertain the genesis of the Spanish Inquisition. In this seminal work, which opened an ongoing debate on the nature of conversion and belief in late medieval Spain, Netanyahu analyzes evidence on the Marranos contained in the Hebrew sources.

For this new edition, Netanyahu has revised and updated the book throughout and added a lengthy postscript in which he reconsiders the Marranos in light of the scholarship that has appeared since publication of the second edition in 1973.

"This book's revolutionary thesis dispels the romanticized heroic image of the Marrano found in Jewish literary and historical annals", says Isaac Barzilay, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. "Netanyahu's conception of the Marranos is of a people whose majority hardly resisted assimilation to Spanish culture and Christianity. Consequently, he unhesitatingly rejects the Inquisition's claim that it was established for the sole purpose of preserving the integrity of Christianity against the undermining effects of Marranism".