This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as 'clerical' and 'lay', 'popular' and 'elite', 'Christian' and 'pagan' as explanatory categories.
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.
What did it mean to be a man in medieval England? Most would answer this question by alluding to the power and status men enjoyed in a patriarchal society, or they might refer to iconic images of chivalrous knights. While these popular ideas do have their roots in the history of the aristocracy, the experience of ordinary men was far more complicated.
Using archaeological evidence and first-hand sources, Konstantin Nossov charts the history of the medieval Russian fortress from its early beginnings until the 14th century.According to Russian legend, in AD 862, the Slav tribes of what is now European Russia invited a number of Scandinavian princes to rule over them. In AD 882, Prince Oleg united these kingdoms as the feudal state of Kievan Rus, by building a series of settlement and border fortifications, including the Zmievy Valy (Snake Ramparts), to protect against foreign invasion.
Early medieval kingship was exercised in a domestic setting with no divide between the officers of state and the royal household. The Laws of Court in the medieval Welsh lawbooks provide some of the most interesting evidence for the structure and operation of a royal court in early medieval Europe. These are richly detailed but also problematic texts, and their correct interpretation is the central concern of The Welsh King and his Court.
