This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture and their representation in literature in late medieval Britain. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English, Welsh and Latin, and addresses such issues as orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition. It considers the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers, and examines the representation of women within different literary genres--both secular and religious--their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and...

In this work, three historians of ideas examine the forms taken in nineteenth-century Britain to develop a 'science of politics'.

One of Britain's leading intellectual historians describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of the past has had in the western world, treating the study of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the cultural history of Europe and America.