The new perspective presented in this study has an important bearing on the economy, landscape, settlement patterns and inter-regional contacts of medieval England. Essays from economic historians, geographers, geomorphologists, archaeologists, and place-name scholars unearth this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and economic growth.
Joan of Arc and Richard III - Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages
Joan of Arc and Richard III loom large in the histories of their countries, but the myths surrounding them have always obscured just who they were and what they hoped to accomplish. In this book, medieval historian Charles Wood brings these fascinating figures to life through an original combination of traditional biography and wide-ranging discussion of the political and social world in which they lived. Wood draws on a range of unusual sources--from art and legal codes to chronicles and lives of saints--to present a new picture of medieval people and their concerns.
Worlds Made Flesh - Chronicle Histories and Medieval Manuscript Culture
This book focuses on the use of the past in two senses.
First, it looks at the way in which medieval texts from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries discussed the past: how they presented history, what kinds of historical narratives they employed, and what anxieties gathered around the practice of historiography.
Second, this study examines twentieth-century interactions with this textual past, and the problems that have arisen for critics trying to negotiate this radically different textual culture.
The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages - Power, Faith and Crusade
These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating “fact” and “fiction” in the Middle Ages.
Treasure is a broad subject, which can be understood in a number of ways, from the economic to the aesthetic, the personal to the political; for the middle ages, it is both a powerful cultural reality and a metaphor. However, despite its importance, this is the first volume to be devoted to the subject. The articles bring together a variety of critical approaches and themes in different periods and contexts throughout the medieval period, covering subjects such as gender, fashion, patronage, ethnicity, death and burial, piety, display and poetics.
