Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Great Britain - Middle Ages (449-1066)

Throughout the centuries, royal mistresses have been worshiped, feared, envied, and reviled. They set the fashions, encouraged the arts, and, in some cases, ruled nations. Eleanor Herman's Sex with Kings takes us into the throne rooms and bedrooms of Europe's most powerful monarchs. Alive with flamboyant characters, outrageous humor, and stirring poignancy, this glittering tale of passion and politics chronicles five hundred years of scintillating women and the kings who loved them.

Curiously, the main function of a royal mistress was not to provide the king with sex but...

In medieval Europe, falconry was perhaps the most popular form of hunting among the aristocracy. Owning a falcon, and the necessary falconer to go with it, was a status symbol throughout the middle ages. This book is the first broad history of English royal falconry in medieval times, a book that draws on forty years of research to provide a full description of the actual practice and conditions of the sport and of the role of falconers in the English royal household.

Robin S. Oggins begins with a description of the birds of prey, their training, and the sport of falconry. He...

The past is a foreign country. This is your guidebook. A time machine has just transported you back into the fourteenth century. What do you see? How do you dress? How do you earn a living and how much are you paid? What sort of food will you be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord? And more important, where will you stay?

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England...

The year 1066 has been regarded traditionally as a great divide in English history, an apparent break with the past which has gained even greater status recently as historians have pushed back the origins of English society to earlier and earlier medieval generations.

Further than 1066 it is difficult to go, for this marks the point beyond which the English peasantry cannot be identified from written sources. Archaeology, however, concerned as it is mainly with small farms and simple town dwellings, has yielded a wealth of data on life in pre-Conquest England, opening a vista on the...

Voices of Medieval England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life provides a broad selection of primary documents that are appropriate in level and content for a variety of readers. It includes dozens of primary document excerpts that illustrate important elements of daily life during the medieval period. Each document is accompanied by an introduction that supplies relevant historical background, context points to help readers evaluate the document, a description of the results and consequences of the document, and a "Further Information" section...

Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period before the Norman Conquest, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. It significantly alters our current picture of Anglo-Welsh relations by overturning the longstanding critical belief that interactions between these two peoples were predominately contentious. In fact, as the book shows, the region which would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier but a distinctly mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone.

The book studies how the region...

Bronze Age fishermen, Roman engineers, Saxon Christians, Norman nobles - Fenland has been home to them all. And without exception, whether noble or villein, bishop or serf, they've all had to cope with life in this marshy, rebellious land.

This book is not really about nobles or bishops, though they make more than their fair share of appearances. It is about the ordinary Fenland folk and the many challenges that faced them in early times.

As the small town of Wisbech rose from its humble Saxon origins to prominence as a medieval assize town, it withstood years of flood,...

This popular primary source reader spans several centuries in over one hundred documents. In addition to constitutional highlights and standard texts such as the Magna Carta and Froissart's Chronicles, the editors include narrative sources on the lived experiences of an array of historical actors. All sources fit into thematic clusters on the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, lay piety, late medieval commercial life, queenship, and Jewish communities.

The new edition begins in 500 CE with sources on the Gregorian mission and Viking invasions. Thirty new sources have been...

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE FORGERIES is a response to the best-selling book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. Using a range of methods and sources, it makes a compelling case that all gospel books of the early Christian era are in fact forgeries largely created in the twelfth century. A number of nationally-cherished icons such as the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels are shown to be fakes. These unsettling revelations, if true, would require a comprehensive rethinking of how we understand Dark Age Europe, and indeed might raise suspicions that much of the history and archaeology...

Most historical accounts examine the Viking Age in one part rather than the whole region of the British Isles and Ireland. Very few pay attention to the continued contact between England and Scandinavia in the post-Norman Conquest period. This book aims to offer an alternative approach by presenting a history of the Viking Age which considers the whole area up to and beyond the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Vikings have been traditionally portrayed as brutal barbarians who sailed to Britain and Ireland to loot, rape and pillage. The evidence presented here suggests a considerably less...