This third edition of the Handbook of British Chronology, published by the Royal Historical Society in 1986, is now available from Cambridge University Press. This book has been a standard work of reference for serious students of history since the publication of the first edition in 1941. As well as including lists of monarchs, dukes, marquesses and earls, the book details officers of state and archbishops and bishops for the whole of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period through to 1985. This volume will be of particular use to medieval historians, but will also be a valuable...

The Byzantine world underwent a remarkable recovery of intellectual energy in the period following the recovery of Constantinople in 1261. The reaction of the emperors and their entourage of well-educated high officials to their political disasters was a deliberate revival of the glories of ancient Greek culture. The main subject of this book is the preservation and dissemination by this learned elite of such ancient literature, philosophy and science as still survived then, the development of editorial techniques which resulted in more complete and less corrupt texts, and their improvement...

Edmund Fryde provides a general account of the attempt to revive and surpass the standards of classical historiography and charts its progress. The career of Politian, the librarian of Lorenzo the Magnificent, illustrates the advance in scholarship during the fifteenth century. Using new evidence from the Vatican Library the author demonstrates that Lorenzo's library can be largely reconstructed and that a wealth of manuscripts was already available in his time.