Kategoria BISAC: History >> Western Europe - General

Among the readings included are several existing letters by Emma (Einhard's wife), The Life of Charlemagne, and The History of His Relics. The latter work transports us into an almost unknown world as Einhard, the cool rationalist, arranges for a relic salesman, a veritable bone seller, to acquire saints' relics from Italy for installation into his new church. The reader is taken on an intrigue-filled trip to Rome, where Einhard's men creep into churches at night to steal bones and then spirit them away to Einhard in the north. The relics are received in town after town as if...

During the 17th century England and Holland found themselves at war three times, in a clash for economic and naval supremacy, fought out in the cold waters of the North Sea and the English Channel. The First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) pitted the Dutch against Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth Navy, which proved as successful at sea as his New Model Army had been on land. Following the Restoration of 1660 the two maritime powers clashed again, and in the Second Dutch War (1665-67) it was the Dutch who had the upper hand. They humiliated the English by burning their fleet in the Medway (1667),...

A brilliantly concise narrative of the days leading to the outbreak of history's greatest conflagration, 1939 takes readers hour by hour through the nail-biting decisions that determined the fate of millions. Richard Overy, a leading historian of the period, masterfully recreates the jockeying for advantage that set Europe's greatest powers on a collision course. Would Stalin join Hitler in a bid to divide Poland and flout the West? Would Britain and...

Georgius Florentius Gregorius, better known to posterity as Gregory, Bishop of Tours, was born about 538 to a highly distinguished Gallo-Roman family in Clermont in the region of Auvergne. Best known for his 10-book Histories (often called the History of the Franks), Gregory left us detailed accounts of his own times as well as those of the early Merovingian kings, known as the "long-haired kings," who united the Franks and took control of most of Gaul in the late fifth and early sixth century. Although he is one of the most important historians of pre-modern times, the...

An unwilling, desperate nun trapped in the cloister, unable to gain release: such is the image that endures today of monastic life in early modern Europe. In By Force and Fear, Anne Jacobson Schutte demonstrates that this and other common stereotypes of involuntary consignment to religious houses shaped by literary sources such as Manzoni's The Betrothed are badly off the mark.

Drawing on records of the Congregation of the Council, held in the Vatican Archive, Schutte examines nearly one thousand petitions for annulment of monastic vows submitted to the Pope and adjudicated...

Die spatmittelalterlichen Heroldskompendien bieten einen wesentlichen Zugang zur Geschichte des Heroldsamtes wie insgesamt zur adeligen Kultur und Lebenswelt. Neben Traktaten zum Heroldswesen enthalten sie vor allem Texte zu adeligen Zeremonien (Turniere, Gerichtskampfe, Obsequien) wie allgemein zur Welt des Adels, dessen Hierarchien und Zeichen. Damit spiegeln sie einen wichtigen Teil der adeligen Wissenskultur wider und prasentieren sich, von der bisherigen Forschung weitgehend unbeachtet, geradezu als eine Art Grundfibel der adeligen Welt. Mit dem vorliegenden Band werden sie erstmals...