Bøker i The Middle Ages Series-serien

Where else . . . can one learn about Carolingian furniture, medicine, dieting, birth control, astrology, . . . drinking habits, or hygiene? A fine introduction to early medieval Europe."-International Historical Studies

In eighth- and ninth-century Byzantium there arose a heated controversy over religious art, known as the "Iconoclastic Controversy." Analyzing hundreds of pages of art-texts, laws, letters, and poems, this book examines the wider context of the debate by providing the first comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm.

Presents a study of Czech society and politics in the High Middle Ages. This work paints a vivid portrait of a flourishing Christian community in the decades between 1050 and 1200. It also reveals the values and strategies that sustained the Czech Lands as a community. It also honors the complexity and dynamism of the medieval exercise of power.

French argues that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities.

"A significant addition to the texts of later medieval European law available in English."-Paul Brand, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Research Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, London

In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community''s infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city''s hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills.Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people''s greater health.

"Invaluable to those who need to disentangle the complex family relationships of those who controlled much of Europe for so many centuries."-American Historical Review

A History Book Club selection

Szpiech draws on medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the role of narrative in the representation of conversion. By investigating conversion not as individual experience but as expression of communal visions of history, he shows how the narratives dramatize the conflict of ideas in disputational writing.

Franciscans and the Elixir of Life makes new connections between alchemy, ritual life, apocalypticism, and the particular commitment of the Franciscan Order to the natural world.

Why would the thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands? Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer this and other questions and offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain circulated in England.

An award-winning anatomy of the Fifth Crusade.

What should historians do with the words of the dead? This work reformulates the historiography of heresy and the inquisition by focusing on depositions taken from the Cathars, a religious sect that opposed the Catholic church and took root in southern France during the twelfth century.

Provides an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne under the independent counts. This work argues that three factors, the rise of the comital state, fiefholding, and the conjugal family, were critical to shaping a loose assortment of baronial and knightly families into an aristocracy with shared customs, institutions, and identity.

In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant to describe.

Between Christian and Jew pivots around the inquisitorial trial of three Jews who were accused in 1341 of persuading Jewish apostates to return to Judaism and die as martyrs. This cultural history explores the worlds of Jews, Jewish converts, and medieval inquisitors as they intersected in northern Iberia in the Crown of Aragon.

Through hundreds of published and unpublished sources, Alex J. Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader influence in the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages.

Joseph O'Callaghan offers the first full and authoritative history of the epic battle for control of the Strait of Gibraltar waged by Castile, Morocco, and Granada in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries-a major, but often overlooked chapter in the Christian reconquest of Spain.

"Writing a book about one of the most complex books ever assembled is no easy task, yet Griffiths rises to the occasion. . . . This work will be widely and warmly received by medievalists everywhere."-Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University

Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492.

"The Feast of Saint Abraham is characterized by originality, profound scholarship (especially with regard to new manuscript sources), and by clarity and felicity of style... A fine book."-Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago

Shows the significance, rather than the irrelevance, of medieval dynastic motifs to projects of national unification, arguing that medieval studies can contribute to our understanding of national formations in part by marking the losses produced by union.

"The unique contribution of Venomous Tongues lies in its interdisciplinary approach and the way it situates scolding within a broader range of issues specific to the legal and social history of the period."-L. R. Poos, The Catholic University of America

No Place of Rest pursues the literary traces of the traumatic expulsion of Jews from France in 1306. Through careful readings of liturgical, philosophical, memorial, and medical texts, Susan Einbinder reveals how medieval Jews asserted their identity in exile.

Drawing on fresh work in the social sciences, Rachel Koopmans offers a new model for understanding how medieval miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated within an oral environment. She argues that the miracle collection became a defining genre of the high medieval period.

Jean de Saintre is the intriguing story of a young knight's training, his first love, and his disillusionment. It teems with details of armor, jousting and tournaments, heraldry and crusading-and also with a cheerful, and unexpected, eroticism.

Intended for the undergraduate yet also invaluable for teachers and scholars, this book illustrates how the crusade became crucial for defining and promoting the very concept and boundaries of Latin Christendom. It provides translations of and commentaries on key original sources and up-to-date bibliographic materials.