Medieval category: 3965 books

Robert Guiscard, William the Conqueror, Roger I of Sicily and Bohemond Prince of Antioch are just four of the exceptional Norman commanders who not only led their armies to victory in battle but also, through military force, created their own kingdoms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their single-minded...

Europe and the Islamic World sheds much-needed light on the shared roots of Islamic and Western cultures and on the richness of their inextricably intertwined histories, refuting once and for all the misguided notion of a "clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and Europe. In this landmark...

Research on early medieval Cyprus has focused on the late antique "golden age" (late fourth/early fifth to seventh century) and the so-called Byzantine "Reconquista" (post-AD 965) while overlooking the intervening period. This phase was characterized, supposedly, by the division...

In December 1235, Pope Gregory IX altered the mission of a crusade he had begun to preach the year before. Instead of calling for Christian magnates to go on to fight the infidel in Jerusalem, he now urged them to combat the spread of Christian heresy in Latin Greece and to defend the Latin empire...

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution....

The riveting story of Pope St. Celestine V, the pope who retired from the papacy. At the close of the tumultuous Middle Ages, there lived a man who seemed destined from birth to save the world. His name was Peter Morrone, a hermit, a founder of a religious order, and, depending on whom you...

The volume comprises lightly annotated translation of a key medieval Arabic text that bears directly on the Crusades and Crusader society and the Muslim experience of them.

The miracle of St Cuthbert's incorrupt corpse has been the subject of much fascination since his death over thirteen-hundred years ago, inspiring pilgrims, monks, and even the construction of Durham Cathedral itself. Throughout the centuries, Cuthbert's coffin has been opened on six occasions. For...

Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans, Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study...

Confraternities go back to the church of the patristic age; they flourished during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and they have continued to survive in the modern era. Today the Knights of Columbus and the Saint Vincent De Paul Societies in thousands of American Catholic parishes continue the work of medieval confraternities in combining fellowship, piety, and charity.

In Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, Elizabeth Lapina examines a variety of these chronicles, written both by participants in the crusade and by those who stayed behind. Her goal is to understand the enterprise from the perspective of its contemporaries and near contemporaries....

This new view on aspects of the Ghaznavid and Seljuk dynasties concentrates on the relationship of the panegyric poets Farrukhi Sistani (c.995-1032) and Mu'izzi (c.1045-1127) to the Ghaznavid and Seljuk rulers and dignitaries for whom they wrote. Dr Tetley investigates the reliability of the historical...

For many of us, Byzantium remains "byzantine"—obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform popular and scholarly understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical...

Step back into the romance and primal conflict of the medieval period with this collection of fairy tales and folklore from the era. Equal parts charmingly quaint and bracingly brutal, this carefully curated volume is sure to engage and enthrall readers who are curious about the myth and folklore of the Middle Ages.