English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages offers a comprehensive survey of English church monuments from the pre-Conquest period to the early sixteenth century. Ground-breaking in its treatment of the subject in an historical context, it explores medieval monuments both in terms of their social meaning and the role that they played in the religious strategies of the commemorated.
Attention is given to the production of monuments, the pattern of their geographical distribution, the evolution of monument types, and the role of design in communicating the monument's message. A major theme...

Wide-ranging, vivid and authoritative, this is the first book to treat chivalry as part of the wider history of medieval England.
The world of medieval chivalry is at once glamorous and violent, alluring yet alien. Our popular views of the period are largely inherited from the nineteenth-century romantics, for whom chivalry evoked images of knights in shining armour, competing for the attention of fair ladies -- with pennons and streamers fluttering from castle battlements.
But what is the reality? Were the rituals and romance of chivalry designed to provide an escape from the brutal...

The three Richards who ruled England in the Middle Ages were among the most controversial and celebrated of its rulers. Richard I ('Coeur de Lion', 1189-99) was a great crusading hero; Richard II (1377-99) was an authoritarian aesthete deposed by his cousin, Henry IV, and murdered; while Richard III (1483-85), as the murderer of his nephews, 'The Princes in the Tower', was the most notorious villain in English history. This highly readable joint biography shows how much the three kings had in common, apart from their names. All were younger sons of monarchs, not expected to come to the...