Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, has, since his death in 1250, enjoyed a reputation as one of the most remarkable monarchs in the history of Europe. His wide cultural tastes, his apparent tolerance of Jews and Muslims, his defiance of the papacy, and his supposed aim of creating a new, secular world order make him a figure especially attractive to contemporary historians.
Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures - New Essays
This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. Following an introduction that examines methodological questions in the study of the sacred and the secular, the other essays treat (among other topics): Old English poetry, troubadour lyrics, twelfth-century romance, the Gregorian Reform, Middle English lyrics and the work of the Pearl-poet, Luther, and Shakespeare. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.
This study explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s and 90s. Examining writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, and Rohinton Mistry, with particularly close readings of Midnight’s Children, A Suitable Boy, The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses, Neelam Srivastava investigates different aspects of postcolonial identity within the secular framework of the Anglophone novel.
This finely illustrated book explores over seven hundred years of European warfare, from the time of Charlemagne to the end of the middle ages (c. 1500). The period covered has a distinctive character in military history.
It was an age when organization for war was integral to social structure, when the secular aristocrat was by necessity also a warrior, and whose culture was profoundly influenced by martial ideas.
