The most famous medieval wars of European expansion, the Crusades, were originally military expeditions sponsored by the papacy for recovery of Christian sites in Palestine. The Crusades also provided land and opportunity for poor and restless knights. Castles were thus built by an alien aristocracy in a hostile environment to provide shelter and to maintain control over the surrounding countryside. After a sketch of the literature and of fortifications before the crusades, Kennedy (history, Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland) explores the evolution of castle styles, siege techniques, and defensive technologies, relying on the evidence of both Western and Muslim chroniclers and of archaeology.
Added by: badaboom | Karma: 5366.29 | Fiction literature | 26 November 2010
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The High History of the Holy Grail
Perceval smiteth his horse of his spurs and cometh to the first in such sort that he passeth his spear right through his body and beareth him to the ground dead. The other two knights each smote his man so that they wounded them in the body right sore. The other two would fain have fled, but Perceval preventeth them, and they gave themselves up prisoners for fear of death. "Lady," saith he, "see here the quittance for your knight that was slain, and the fifth also remaineth lying on the piece of ground shent in like manner as was your own." "Fair son," saith she, "I should have better loved peace after another sort, and so it might be." "Lady," saith he, "Thus is it now.
Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds-artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage.
The Kings and Their Hawks - Falconry in Medieval England
This reviewer greatly anticipated the results of Professor Oggin's decades long interest in falconry, and was gratified with a opus that honored the balance between factual, scholarly work but still offered easily digested prose. This work can be enjoyed on many levels, from several points of view: from the falconry angle, from the medieval history angle, and from the economics of power and monarchy angle.
This volume provides an accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's history and Roman plays. It is attentive throughout to the plays as they have been performed over the centuries since they were written. The first part offers accounts of the genre of the history play, of Renaissance historiography, of pageants and masques, and of women's roles, as well as comparisons with history plays in Spain and the Netherlands. Chapters in the second part look at individual plays as well as other Shakespearean texts which are closely related to the histories. The Companion offers a full bibliography, genealogical tables, and a list of principal and recurrent characters.
