It's not easy to eat well. To choose food wisely, you need to know where it comes from and how it's produced. As consumers, most of us don't know what we're getting and eating in our supermarkets and restaurants. When rumours and food scares circulate in the media, we panic. Since most of us know very little about the real state of agriculture today and the ways in which the global agricultural industry produces the foods that end up on our plates, we have no basis on which to make informed judgements.In this important new book, Jos Bov and Franois Dufour - two men from modest farming...

This important new book, by one of the leading social historians in France today, analyses the changing meaning of rape through numerous case studies across the centuries.


The book begins with a history of the relative tolerance of sexual violence in early modern France, and the tendency to condemn the victims by enveloping them in the shame of the act. It then traces the changing legal attitudes to sexual violence at the end of the eighteenth century, and the slow recognition of the role of moral violence in rape in the nineteenth century. Vigarello also stresses the...

This highly original and engaging book by French historian Robert Muchembled, is a journey through time and space in search of the changing perception and significance of the devil in Western culture.

• An outstanding book about the changing perception and significance of the devil in Western culture.
  
• Robert Muchembled is a well-known historian and an expert on witchcraft, whose work has already been translated into many languages.
  
• The author highlights the way that the changing notion of evil is connected to other changes in society...

This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society.

This book presents a concise, general history of the crusades--whose chief goal was the liberation and preservation of the "holy places" of the Middle East--from the first calls to arms in the later eleventh century to the fall of the last crusader strongholds in Syria and Palestine in 1291. Written by one of the world's great crusader historians, this unique work is the distillation of over forty years' research and contemplation, and the ideal introductory textbook for all students of the crusades.

The Inquisition was the most powerful disciplinary institution in the early modern world, responsible for 300,000 trials and over 1.5 million denunciations. How did it root itself in different social and ethnic environments? Why did it last for three centuries? What cultural, social and political changes led to its abolition? In this first global comparative study, Francisco Bethencourt examines the Inquisition's activities in Spain, Italy, Portugal and overseas Iberian colonies. He demonstrates that the Inquisition played a crucial role in the Catholic Reformation, imposing its own members...

This book is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In it Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore.

The figure of the Byzantine emperor, a ruler who sometimes was also designated a priest, has long fascinated the western imagination. Written by one of the world's leading Byzantine scholars, this classic book studies in detail the imperial union of "two powers," temporal and spiritual, against the broad background of the relationship between church and state and religious and political spheres.

This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of the enslavement of men and women by others of their society and in particular of the means and causes of the gradual end of slavery in early medieval Europe between 500 and 1200. Drawing upon a very wide range of primary and archival sources, Professor Bonnassie places fresh findings about subjection, servitude and lordship in relation to the prevailing understanding of social history which has developed since the work of Marc Bloch. The author explains how slavery long persisted in southern France and Spain, as part of...

This is a standard work of reference for the study of the religious history of western Christianity in the later middle ages which, since its original publication in French in 1981, has come to be regarded as one of the great contributions to medieval studies of recent times. Hagiographical texts and reports of the processes of canonisation - a mode of investigation into saints? lives and their miracles implemented by the popes from the end of the twelfth century - are here used for the first time as major source materials. The book illuminates the main features of the medieval religious...