The Medieval Python

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage--almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in seque

From the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne - the "dark ages" - learning, scholarship, and culture disappeared from the European continent. The great heritage of western civilization - from the

Bertrandon de la Broquiere was esquire to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Philip had plans for a new Crusade to the Holy Land and as part of this plan he persuaded Bertrandon to undertake a pilgrim

Surveying government and crowd responses ranging from the late Middle Ages through to the early modern era, Buchanan Sharp's illuminating study examines how the English government responded to one of the most intractable problems of the period: famine and scarcity. The book provides a comprehensive account of famine relief in the late Middle Ages and evaluates the extent to which traditional market regulations enforced by thirteenth-century kings helped shape future responses to famine and scarcity in the sixteenth century. Analysing some of the oldest surviving archival evidence of public response to famine, Sharp reveals that food riots in England occurred as early as 1347, almost two centuries earlier than was previously thought. Charting the policies, public reactions and royal regulations to grain shortage, Sharp provides a fascinating contribution to our understanding of the social, economic, cultural and political make-up of medieval and early modern England.

Archaeological investigations were carried out in 2006-9 on the north bank of the River Thames at Riverbank House, City of London, just upstream of the modern London Bridge and its medieva

The touchstones of Gothic monumental art in France - the abbey church of Saint-Denis and the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and Bourges - form the core of this collection dedicated to the memory of An

Through an examination of a variety of literary genres composed in Arabic and Hebrew, this book examines the literary definition of al-Andalus by taking into account the role of memory, language, and