Ulrich von Liechtenstein's extraordinary account of his adventures as a knight-errant is one of the most vivid images of chivalric life to have come down to us. His knightly autobiography was written in the mid-thirteenth century, and gives an account of the "journey of Venus" which he undertook in 1226 in honour of his lady, in which he claimed to have broken 307 spears in jousts against all comers in the space of a month. Some of it is obviously quietly exaggerated, written for his friends' entertainment many years later, and he is not above a sly dig at the conventions of courtly love, but...

Within three generations (1426 to 1485), and through the dark anddangerous years of the Wars of the Roses, the Pastons establishedthemselves as a family of consequence, both in their native Norfolk andwithin court circles. Ambitious and highly mobile -- womenfolk as wellas men -- they kept in touch by correspondence, usually but notinvariably through the medium of a clerk. These letters, a raresurvival, break upon us across the centuries with the urgency, andsometimes the violence, of their preoccupations: defending property, fighting court cases, making the right alliances, and, on the...

John Aubrey's racy portraits of the great figures of 17th-centuryEngland stand alongside Pepys's diary as a vivid evocation of theperiod. Aubrey was born in 1626, the son of a Wiltshire squire; at theage of 26 he inherited a family estate encumbered with debt, andfinally went bankrupt in the 1670s. From then on he led a sociable, rootless existence at the houses of friends -- from Oxford and theMiddle Temple --pursuing the antiquarian studies which had alwaysobsessed him. At his death in 1697 he left a mass of notes andmanuscripts, among them the material for Brief Lives. He nevermanaged to...