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This volume is the result of a conference at University College London in 2007 which addressed the scale and form of civil defences in early medieval Europe, c. 800-1000. Previous work has largely focussed on individual sites or specific categories of evidence. These papers offer new interdisciplinary perspectives driven by a landscape approach. Several contributions focus on civil defence in England around the time of King Alfred the Great, and together provide a new agenda for the study of Anglo-Saxon military landscapes. European case-studies facilitate a comparative approach to local and regional defensive structures and interpretive paradigms. Topics and themes covered include civil defence landscapes, the organization and form of defensive structures, and the relationships and dynamics between social complexity, militarization, and external threats. With papers ranging from England to Spain and Germany to Scandinavia the volume is of relevance to a range of disciplines including archaeology, history, onomastics, geography, and anthropology

How did medieval society deal with private justice, with grudges, and with violent emotions? This ground-breaking reader collects for the first time a number of unpublished or difficult-to-find texts that address violence and emotion in the Middle Ages.The sources collected here illustrate the power and reach of the language of vengeance in medieval European society. They span the early, high, and later middle ages, and capture a range of perspectives including legal sources, learned commentaries, narratives, and documents of practice. Though social elites necessarily figure prominently in all medieval sources, sources concerning relatively low-status individuals and sources pertaining to women are included. The sources range from saints' lives that illustrate the idea of vengeance to later medieval court records concerning vengeful practices. A secondary goal of the collection is to illustrate the prominence of mechanisms for peacemaking in medieval European society. The introduction traces recent scholarly developments in the study of vengeance and discusses the significance of these concepts for medieval political and social history

Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.

Chapter 1. The Middle Ages - the History of an Idea -- Chapter 2. The Problem of Periodization -- Chapter 3. Some General Themes in Medieval History -- Chapter 4. The Sources of Medieval History -- Chapter 5. The Writing of History in the Middle Ages -- Chapter 6. Documentary Sources -- Chapter 7. Coins -- Chapter 8. The Material Record.

This collection of essays by the eminent historian Joseph Strayer makes available in one volume his important shorter studies on the central theme of the political, constitutional, and institutional history of France and England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durab

Introduction : religious charity -- The pious and the practical : an ideology of charity -- A cascade of hospitals -- To shelter the pilgrim : military orders, hospices, and bridges -- The Hospitaller orders -- Lay piety -- Charity that sanctifies -- The religious dimensions of care -- Conclusion : between two worlds : an elusive paradigm

This book reexamines the origins and growth of the medieval inquisition which provided a framework for the large-scale operations against religious dissidents. In the last quarter of the twelfth century, the papacy launched concerted efforts to hunt out heretics, mostly Cathars and Waldensians, and directed operations against them all across Latin Christendom. The bull of Pope Lucius III Ad abolendam of 1184 became a turning point in the formation of the inquisitorial system which made both the clergy and the laity responsible for suppressing any religious dissent. From a comparative perspective, the study analyzes political, social and religious developments which in the High Middle Ages gave birth to the mechanism of repression and religious violence supervised by the papacy and operated by bishops and, starting from the 1230s, papal inquisitors, extraordinary judges delegate staffed mostly by Dominican and Franciscan friars.

This is an attempt to construct an ordered synthesis of the evolution of labor in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. Its aim is not only to analyze the variations in the legal status of persons and of lands, but above all to set the working classes in the historical framework in which they lived, to trace the reciprocal action of political and social institutions, of exchange, of industrial and agricultural production, of the colonization of the soil, of the distribution of landed and movable wealth, upon those economic transformations which brought about the appearance of new forms of l

The essays in this volume of the Journal continue its proud tradition of presenting cutting-edge research with a wide chronological and geographical, range, from eleventh-century Georgia (David IV's use of the methods described in De velitatione bellica) to fifteenth-century England and France (a detailed analysis of the use of the under-appreciated lancegay and similar weapons). Iberia and the Empire are also addressed, with a study of Aragonese leaders in the War of the Two Pedros, a discussion of Prince Ferdinand's battle-seeking strategy prior to the battle of Toro in 1476, and an analysis and transcription of a newly-discovered Habsburg battle plan of the early sixteenth century, drawn up for the war against Venice. The volume also embraces different approaches, from cultural-intellectual history (the afterlife of the medieval Christian Warrior), to experimental archaeology (the mechanics of raising trebuchets), to comparison of 'the face of battle' in a medieval illuminated manuscript with its depiction in modern films, to archivally-based administrative history (recruitment among the sub-gentry for Edward I's armies).

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- What Is Crime? -- Why Crime? -- Methodology and Methodological Issues -- Historical Context -- The Concepts of Crime and Punishment in Medieval Europe -- Temporal and Geographical Scope -- The Scarcity of Historical Information -- The History of Medieval Crime -- The History of Jewish Medieval Crime -- The Sources -- The Plan of This Book -- 1. "The Thieves That Go from House to House": Jewish Thieves in Medieval Europe -- A Time of Great Risk, Opportunity, and Change: The Late Tenth and Early to Mid-Eleventh Century -- A Guilty Conscience Needs No Accuser? -- For We Can Do No Wrong: Jewish Communal Regulations on Theft -- Stealing from Jews -- Using Magic to Steal -- People of the Book: The Rough Waters and the Solemn Banks of the Stolen Hebrew Book Market -- Battling Theft by Preaching -- Theft within and from the Community -- 2. "Be Gone Thou Man of Blood": Murder and Murderers in Medieval European Jewish Society -- An Israelite and a Levi on the Edge of Tzarfat: A Case from Limoges, Late Tenth Century -- The Status of a Murderer: What's in a Gaze? -- "He Who Kills in Our Times": From the Gaonic Period to Fifteenth-Century Europe -- Lethal Inclinations, Gentiles, and Exile: The Homilies of Rabbi Judah the Pious -- A Murderer in Our Midst: Addressing Extreme Violence in the Community -- 3. Women and Crime -- Methodological Problems -- Prostitution -- Violence in the Domestic Sphere -- Conclusion -- Appendix 1: "Lest She Go Astray" -- Appendix 2: The Plundered Goods Caravan -- Appendix 3: The Renegade Cleric -- Appendix 4: Letter of Deliverance -- Appendix 5: The Case from Poland -- Appendix 6: The Manual of Penance -- Appendix 7: A Ḥazan Who Has Killed a Soul -- Appendix 8: A Responsum by Meir of Rothenburg -- Appendix 9: The Death of the Wife of Milo.

A collection which highlights 'the range and richness of scholarship on medieval warfare, military institutions, and cultures of conflict that characterize the field', 'History' 95 [2010]. The journal's hallmark of a broad chronological, geographic, and thematic coverage of the subject is underlined in this volume. It begins with an examination of the brief but fascinating career of an armed league of (mostly) commoners who fought to suppress mercenary bands and to impose a reign of peace in southern France in 1182-1184. This is followed by a thorough re-examination of Matilda of Tuscany's defeat of Henry IV in 1090-97. Two pieces on Hispanic topics - a substantial analysis of the remarkable military career of Jaime I 'the Conqueror' of Aragon (r. 1208-1276), and a case study of the campaigns of a single Spanish king, Enrique II of Castile (r. 1366-79), contributing to the active debate over the role of open battle in medieval strategy - come next. Shorter essays deal with the size of the Mongol armies that threatened Europe in the mid-thirteenth century, and with a surprising literary description, dating to 1210-1220, of a knight employing the advanced surgical technique of thoracentesis. Further contributions correct the common misunderstanding of the nature of deeds of arms 'à outrance' in the fifteenth century, and dissect the relevance of the 'infantry revolution' and 'artillery revolution' to the French successes at the end of the Hundred Years War. The final note explores what etymology can reveal about the origins of the trebuchet. Clifford Rogers is Professor of History, West Point Military Academy; Kelly DeVries is Professor of History, Loyola College, Maryland; John France is Professor of History at the University of Swansea. Contributors: John France, Valerie Eads, Don Kagay, Carl Sverdrup, Jolyon T. Hughes, L. J. Andrew Villalon, Will McLean, Anne Curry, Will Sayers