The counter-epic is a literary style that developed in reaction to imperialist epic conventions as a means of scrutinizing the consequences of foreign conquest of dominated peoples. It also functioned as a transitional literary form, a bridge between epic narratives of military heroics and novelistic narratives of commercial success. In Discourses of Empire, Barbara Simerka examines the representation of militant Christian imperialism in early modern Spanish literature by focusing on this counter-epic discourse.

By trying to answer leading questions, 16 authors (historians, archaeologists and linguists) deal with ten important kingdoms of this period and with their political and legal context the role of the Empire and the law-codes.

New discoveries constantly make us rethink what we know about Roman history. A Companion to the Roman Empire keeps students and professional historians up to date with these developments, but also demonstrates to a wider audience why the Roman Empire remains a compelling and vibrant subject. It provides readers with a guide both to Roman imperial history and to the field of Roman studies.The individual contributors to this volume all make significant new contributions to the areas about which they are writing.

He was born Temujin, the son of a khan, raised in a clan of hunters migrating across the rugged steppe. Temujin’s young life was shaped by a series of brutal acts: the betrayal of his father by a neighboring tribe and the abandonment of his entire family, cruelly left to die on the harsh plain. But Temujin endured—and from that moment on, he was driven by a singular fury: to survive in the face of death, to kill before being killed, and to conquer enemies who could come without warning from beyond the horizon.

Warfare was an integral part of early medieval life. It had a character of its own and was neither a pale shadow of Roman military practice nor an insignificant precursor to the warfare of the central middle ages. This book recovers its distinctiveness, looking at warfare in a rounded context in the British Isles and Western Europe between the end of the Roman Empire and the break-up of the Carolingian Empire. In this work, Guy Halsall relates warfare to many aspects of medieval life, economy, society and politics...