Charlemagne is often claimed as the greatest ruler in Europe before Napoleon. In this magisterial new study, Rosamond McKitterick re-examines Charlemagne the ruler and his reputation. She analyses the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced after his death, and thereafter focuses on the evidence from Charlemagne's lifetime concerning the ...
In this atlas, pictures of art and architecture accompanying an expertly written text are featured alongside stunning maps covering nearly a millennium of medieval civilizations around the world, capturing the Arab invasions of Europe, the empire of Charlemagne, the African kingdoms of Songhai and Mali, the Crusades, the Viking and Mongol invasions
This book provides new perspectives on the ways in which scholastic natural philosophy anticipated and contributed to the emergence of scientific thought. Historians of medieval science have hesitated to step outside the sphere of intellectual culture in their search for factors influencing proto-scientific thought. This book searches for ...
The Early Middle Ages (400-1000) was one of the most dynamic and crucial periods in the formation of Europe. It covers the transition from the relatively diverse world of Roman Empire in late antiquity, to the disparate world of early medieval Europe, where local differences assumed far greater significance, but where, nonetheless, the institution ...
An exciting examination of the entire history of the Carolingian 'dynasty' in western Europe. The author shows the whole period to be one of immense political, religious. cultural and intellectual dynamism; not only did it lay the foundations of the governmental and administrative institutions of Europe and the organisation of the Church, but it ...
The barbarians of the fifth and sixth centuries were long thought to be races, tribes or ethnic groups who toppled the Roman Empire and racist, nationalist assumptions about the composition of the barbarian groups still permeate much scholarship on the subject. This book proposes a new view, through a case-study of the Goths of Italy between 489 ...
This book explores the full range of social, economic, religious and cultural contacts between England and the German city of Cologne during the central Middle Ages, c. 1000 to c. 1300. A wealth of original archive material reveals an extensive network of English and German emigrants who were surprisingly successful in achieving assimilation into ...
This volume of specially commissioned essays takes as its theme the legacy of Rome in Carolingian culture in eighth- and ninth-century Europe. No such comprehensive survey of this kind exists in any language. The book is made the more unusual by departing from the customary stress on the concept of renewal to emphasise the enormous creativity and ...
This book is a pioneering study of politics and society in the early Middle Ages. Whereas it is widely believed that the source materials for early medieval Europe are too sparse to allow sustained study of the workings of social and political relationships on the ground, this book focuses on a uniquely well-documented area to investigate the ...
This volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers most of the period of Frankish and Carolingian dominance in western Europe. It was one of remarkable political and cultural coherence, combined with crucial, very diverse and formative developments in every sphere of life. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the authors consider ...
This book examines Gibbon's interpretations of empire and the intellectual context in which he formulated them against a background of the eighteenth- and late twentieth-century knowledge of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Gibbon's ideas of empire, his understanding of monarchy and the balance of power, his sources and working methods, the ...
Clement V, the first 'Avignon' pope, led the Church during nine critical years, 1305-14. Elected two years after the outrage committed upon Boniface VIII at Anagni, Clement saw as his main goal the restoration of harmonious relations with the leading monarchs of Christendom. In achieving his aim, he paved the way for the Church in the modern ...
The writing and reading of history in the early Middle Ages form the key themes of this book. The primary focus is on the remarkable manifestations of historical writing in relation to historical memory in the Frankish kingdoms of the eighth and ninth centuries. It considers the audiences for history in the Frankish kingdoms, the recording of ...
The sixth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers the fourteenth century, a period dominated by plague, other natural disasters and war which brought to an end three centuries of economic growth and cultural expansion in Christian Europe, but one which also saw important developments in government, religious and intellectual life, and ...
This book is a study of two important and related pieces of thirteenth-century English legislation - the Provisions of Westminster of 1259 and the Statute of Marlborough of 1267 - and is the first on any of the statutes of this period of major legislative change. The Provisions of Westminster were the first major legislation enacted in England ...
This is a study of the place of patron saints in Frankish society during the Carolingian and early Capetian periods. The book focuses on the composition of works in praise of dead holy people - hagiography - and the veneration of their physical remains - the cult of saints. It examines the patrons of a single diocese, Orleans, because a saint's ...
This pioneering book studies the function and status of the written word in Carolingian society in France and Germany in the eighth- and ninth-centuries. It demonstrates that literacy was by no means confined to a clerical elite, but was dispersed in lay society and used for government and administration, and for ordinary legal transactions among ...
From 1250 to 1795 Lithuania covered a vast area of eastern and central Europe. Until 1387 the country was pagan. How this huge state came to expand, defend itself against western European crusaders and play a conspicuous part in European life are the main subjects of this book. Chapters are devoted to the types of sources used, to the religion of ...
William, archbishop of Tyre from 1175 to c.1184, was a churchman, royal servant and scholar who lived in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Born in Jerusalem around 1130, he studied in western Europe for almost twenty years until 1165, when he returned to the East to begin his career in public life. He left to posterity a monumental history in which ...
How exactly did political power operate in early medieval Europe? Taking Alsace as his focus, Hans Hummer offers an intriguing new case study on localised and centralised power and the relationship between the two from c. 600-1000. Providing a panoramic survey of the sources from the region, which include charters, notarial formulas, royal ...
In recent years the study of medieval courts has become a flourishing field. The courts of kings and popes, or of the Burgundian dukes, have usually attracted most attention. This book offers by contrast a wide-ranging study of a little-known, medium-sized court - that of Guelders in the Low Countries. Guelders offers an excellent vantage point ...
Italy had long experienced literacy under Roman rule, but what happened to literacy in Italy under the rule of a barbarian people? This book examines the evidence for the use of literacy in Lombard Italy c. 568-774, a period usually considered as the darkest of the Dark Ages in Italy due to the poor survival of written evidence and the reputation ...
This study examines the role of written agreements in eleventh- and twelfth-century Catalonia, and how they determined the social and political order. By tracing the fate of these agreements - or convenientiae - from their first appearance to the late twelfth century, it is possible to demonstrate the remarkable stability of the fluid structures ...
This volume examines the nature of aristocratic society in the Spanish kingdom of Le nd Castile in the twelfth century. Drawing on an extensive range of original sources, many of them unpublished, it highlights the unrivalled wealth, status and power enjoyed by some members of the aristocracy. It also explores the multifarious roles that lay ...
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