The Medieval Python

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has

Honorable Mention for the SMFS First Book Prize! On the Purification of Women examines the medieval ritual of churching, a rite of purification after childbirth performed on a woman’s first visit to c

The essays treat same-sex desire and life choices among medieval women by covering a diverse cultural domain and a wider range of fields, disciplines, and approaches than ever attempted in this contex

Since medieval times, the mystical tradition of Kabbalah was restricted to qualified men over forty—because it was believed that only the most mature and pious could grasp its complexity and p

In this volume, Georges Duby examines the lives of prominent twelfth-century French women as well as popular female literary figures of that time. Focusing on medieval notions of women and love, Duby

This history of medieval warfare, originally written in 1885 when its author—later one of the great medievalists—was still an undergraduate at Oxford, remains for students and general readers one of t

The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews

Conduct Becoming examines a new genre of late medieval writing that focuses on a wife's virtuous conduct and ability of such conduct to alter marital and social relations in the world. Considering a r

This monograph concerns one of the great watersheds in the historical development of medieval Byzantium, the Turkish penetration of Asia Minor in the wake of the creation of the Seljuk Empire in the c

This book provides a needed overview of the scholarship on medieval public culture and popular movements such as the Peace of God, heresy, and the crusades and illustrates how a changing sense of the

This monograph uses a medieval Arabic chronicle, The Chronicle of Seert, as a window into the Christian history of Iraq. The Chronicle describes events that are unknown from other sources, but it is m

Palladius wrote in the 5th century AD. His is the latest of Roman agricultural texts and perhaps for that reason was the treatise most widely distributed in the medieval world, being translated into I

The World of Ibn Tufayl consists of ten essays by scholars in different fields in Arab-Islamic studies on Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, one of the most extraordinary works of medieval Arabic literatur

In the medieval period, the monarch was seen as the embodiment of the community of his kingdom, the body politic. And while we've long since shed that view, it nonetheless continues to influence our u

Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty—a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre—took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity

During the medieval and early modern periods the Welsh diocese of St Davids was one of the largest in the country and the most remote. As this collection makes clear, this combination of factors resul

Cross the threshold into the world of the High Middle Ages and explore the illuminating wisdom, beauty and art of the Gothic cathedrals, stunning wonders of the medieval era for all to see today. From

Tutbury and Needwood forest have a rich history, fully explored here from the earliest times to the present day: the former with its great medieval castle, the heart of a major feudal honor held from

In Mystical Origins of the Tarot, Paul Huson traces each symbol of the Minor Arcana to ancient Persia, and the Major Arcana Trump card images to the medieval world. A thorough examination of each car

Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a c

Originally published in 1907, this title constructs a historical account of life in medieval England through the use of literary sources. The book begins with the Anglo-Saxon settlement and ends at approximately 1400, providing a broad narrative of English national development. This narrative directly incorporates material from a wide variety of literary sources, with comprehensive references appearing in the margin. As noted in the preface, these references are an essential component of the text, removing it 'from the domain of pure imaginative fiction to the sure ground of a literary and historic reflection of real life and character'. This is a highly readable book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in medieval English history and literature.

It has become widely accepted among musicologists that medieval music is most profitably studied from interdisciplinary perspectives that situate it within broad cultural contexts. The origins of this consensus lie in a decisive reorientation of the field that began approximately four decades ago. For much of the twentieth century, research on medieval music had focused on the discovery and evaluation of musical and theoretical sources. The 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, witnessed calls for broader methodologies and more fully contextual approaches that in turn anticipated the emergence of the so-called 'New Musicology'. The fifteen essays in the present collection explore three interrelated areas of inquiry that proved particularly significant: the liturgy, sources (musical and archival), and musical symbolism. In so doing, these essays not only acknowledge past achievements but also illustrate how this broad, interdisciplinary approach remains a source for scholarly innovation.

This 1998 study serves as a contribution to both reception history, examining the medieval response to Chrétien's poetry, and genre history, suveying the evolution of Arthurian verse romance in French. It describes the evolutionary changes taking place between Chrétien's Eric et Enide and Froissart's Meliador, the first and last examples of the genre, and is unique in placing Chrétien's work, not as the unequalled masterpieces of the whole of Arthurian literature, but as the starting point for the history of the genre, which can subsequently be traced over a period of two centuries in the French-speaking world. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study was first published in German in 1985, but her radical argument that we need urgently to redraw the lines on the literary and linguistic map of medieval Britain and France is only now being made available in English.

This book gives a picture of the daily and yearly round of the English peasant in the Middle Ages. H. S. Bennett explains the feudal system which linked the poor man to the soil and to the service of his lord and the church in a pattern of customary dues and rights, payments, labours and small privileges. The author gives lively details of the pattern of medieval country life: the influence of the seasons and the state of contemporary knowledge on the work of the fields; the place of religion in everyday life; the workings of feudal justice; popular attitudes to the social structure; the business of getting a living. Since all the inhabitants of England outside the few large towns were essentially countrymen, this is an introduction to life in medieval England as a whole.

The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by powerful Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and other non-Muslim state officials, whose employment occasioned energetic discussions among Muslim scholars and rulers. This book reveals those discussions for the first time in all their diversity, drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the realms of law, history, poetry, entertaining literature, administration, and polemic. It follows the discourse on non-Muslim officials from its beginnings in the Umayyad empire (661–750), through medieval Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Spain, to its apex in the Mamluk period (1250–1517). Far from being an intrinsic part of Islam, views about non-Muslim state officials were devised, transmitted, and elaborated at moments of intense competition between Muslim and non-Muslim learned elites. At other times, Muslim rulers employed non-Muslims without eliciting opposition. The particular shape of the Islamic discourse on this issue is com

This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided the medieval West with fundamental political, religious and social structures, including a change from the Roman perspective on ethnicity as the quality of the 'Other' to the Carolingian perception that a variety of Christian peoples were chosen by God to reign over the former Roman provinces. Interpreting identity as an open-ended process, Helmut Reimitz explores the role of Frankish identity in the multiple efforts through which societies tried to find order in the rapidly changing post-Roman world.

This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided the medieval West with fundamental political, religious and social structures, including a change from the Roman perspective on ethnicity as the quality of the 'Other' to the Carolingian perception that a variety of Christian peoples were chosen by God to reign over the former Roman provinces. Interpreting identity as an open-ended process, Helmut Reimitz explores the role of Frankish identity in the multiple efforts through which societies tried to find order in the rapidly changing post-Roman world.

Warfare and dislocation are obvious features of the break-up of the late Roman West, but this crucial period of change was characterized also by communication and diplomacy. The great events of the late antique West were determined by the quieter labours of countless envoys, who travelled between emperors, kings, generals, high officials, bishops, provincial councils, and cities. This book examines the role of envoys in the period from the establishment of the first 'barbarian kingdoms' in the West, to the eve of Justinian's wars of re-conquest. It shows how ongoing practices of Roman imperial administration shaped new patterns of political interaction in the novel context of the earliest medieval states. Close analysis of sources with special interest in embassies offers insight into a variety of genres: chronicles, panegyrics, hagiographies, letters and epitaph. This study makes a significant contribution to the developing field of ancient and medieval communications.

A theory of the margin has long featured in the work of medieval historians. Marginal regions are taken to be those of poor soil or geographical remoteness, where farmers experienced particular difficulties in grain production. It is argued that such regions were cultivated only when demographic pressure intensified in the thirteenth century, but that a combination of soil exhaustion and demographic decline resulted in severe economic contraction by the end of the fourteenth century. Marginal regions are seen not just as sensitive barometers of economic change but as important catalysts in that change. Despite the importance placed by historians on the general theory of the margin, this book represents the first detailed study of a 'marginal region'. It focuses upon East Anglian Breckland, whose blowing sands are among the most barren soils in lowland England. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, this study reconstructs Breckland's late medieval economy, and shows it to be more divers

'Why still read it? Why should scholars consult it and undergraduates study it? The plan answer is that still after ninety years remains the greatest single book on English medieval history': thus J. C. Holt in his foreword to this new impression of one of the classic historical texts in any language. In three extended essays Maitland exploits the information in Domesday to analyse and reconstruct the society, law, government, economy and even something of the mental and imaginative world of early medieval England. Essay I examines the nature of English society in 1066 and how, by 1086, this had changed. The second essay explores pre-Conquest England, stretching back through the Anglo-Saxon law codes and land-books to the English settlement, its social structure and administrative geography. Essay III uses an exhaustive discussion of the hide (that 'dreary old question') to look again at methods of assessment and measurement, and their relationship to the wealth and resources of Englan

Magic. Mystery. Time-travel. Get whisked back to the time of medieval knights with Jack and Annie!A castle. A knight. A quest! When the magic tree house takes Jack and Annie back to the Middle Ages, they're looking for a knight. Instead, they find the Great Hall of a castle where a feast is under way.But Jack and Annie aren't exactly welcome guests . . . !

The Ambrosian liturgy and its music, practiced in and around medieval Milan, is the only one of several regional traditions not to have been suppressed during the Carolingian urge to uniformity that

What does it mean to be a man? Moreover, how do you as a father instill that reality in your son? By Raising a Modern-Day Knight.The medieval custom of knighthood offers an unique approach to shaping

Placing heroes from a wide range of medieval traditions shoulder to shoulder, this title provides the opportunity to examine what is common across medieval mythic, legendary, and folkloric traditions

Navigating the seemingly competing claims of human reason and divine revelation to truth is without a doubt one of the central problems of medieval philosophy. Medieval thinkers argued a whole gamut o

This is the first book in a generation on medieval agriculture in Wales, presenting evidence which is of considerable relevance to those studying the development of the early medieval landscapes of En

Toch (medieval history, Hebrew U. of Jerusalem) presents a fascinating study of medieval Jewish economic history, though it is a bit more ambitious than just economic history. He focuses on the distri

Chess is the most enduring and universal game in history. Here, bestselling author David Shenk chronicles its intriguing saga, from ancient Persia to medieval Europe to the dens of Benjamin Franklin a

Dorot ‘Olam (Generations of the Ages), written by Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo (c. 1110-1180) is one of the most influential historical works of medieval Hebrew literature. This edition shows how the wo

In this book, Shira Weiss elucidates the moral tradition of the Hebrew Bible by subjecting ethically challenging biblical texts to moral philosophical analysis. Examining the most essential questions of Jewish Thought, she uses contemporary philosophy to decipher Scriptural ethics as uncovered from a variety of biblical stories. Aided by ancient, medieval, and contemporary resources, Weiss presents a comprehensive discussion of enduring ethical questions that arise from biblical narrative and continue to be contested in modern times. She shows how such analysis can unsettle assumptions and beliefs, as well as foster moral reflection. Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible will be of interest to scholars and students of ethics, philosophy, Jewish thought, biblical theology, and exegesis.