"Gives the reader a portrayal of the social institutions of a Germanic people far richer and more exhaustive than any other available source."--from the Foreword, by Edward Peters

From the bloody clashes of the third and fourth centuries there emerged a society that was neither Roman nor Burgundian, but a compound of both. The Burgundian Code offers historians and anthropologists alike illuminating insights into a crucial period of contact between a developed and a tribal society.

Here presented for the first time in English are the law codes of the Lombard kings who ruled Italy from the sixth to the eighth centuries. The documents afford unparalleled insight into the structure and values of Germanic society.

"History of the Lombards," by Paul the Deacon (c. 720-c. 799), is among the most important and oldest accounts of the Germanic nation. The book preserves many ancient myths and popular traditions and draws from sources that are now lost. The history traces the changing fortunes of the Lombards, the last of the migratory Germanic peoples to enter the western part of the old Roman Empire, from their first appearance in the West in the sixth century to the middle of the eighth century. The popularity of Paul the Deacon's book has endured over the centuries and, although there have been...

Henry Charles Lea was one of the first American historians to use what would later be termed comparative and anthropological approaches to history. Under his pen, the study of the medieval ordeal becomes a study in cultural history.

Reprinted here from the fourth revised edition of 1892, the book begins by tracing the role of the ordeal in non-Western and ancient societies, showing the mental world to which it belongs: a limited trust in the public order and purely human methods of inquiry, and a larger faith in divine intervention and immanent justice. The work then describes the...