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This book demolishes the widely held view that the phrase 'medieval business' is an oxymoron. The authors review the entire range of business in medieval western Europe, probing its Roman and Christian heritage to discover the economic and political forces that shaped the organization of agriculture, manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation and marketing. Businessmen's responses to the devastating plagues, famines, and warfare that beset Europe in the late Middle Ages are equally well covered. Medieval businessmen's remarkable success in coping with this hostile new environment was 'a harvest of adversity' that prepared the way for the economic expansion of the sixteenth century. Two main themes run through this book. First, the force and direction of business development in this period stemmed primarily from the demands of the elite. Second, the lasting legacy of medieval businessmen was less their skillful adaptations of imported inventions than their brilliant innovations in business organization

AbstractWomen have been generally relegated to the margins of traditional historiography. They have often been presented as romantic heroines - good or bad - but most of the time they were utterly neglected as historical actors. A prevalent tendency of the nouvelle histoire is the revision of these inherited and by now strongly dated approaches. Modern histori ans try to reconstruct how women lived and worked in the past; they analyze women's roles and functions as integral parts of larger socio-historical structures. While in Western Europe and in the United States women's history has become a research field on its own and produced remarkable results, in East Central Europe this change of attitude towards women in history has not yet happened. By launching a research project on "Women and Power in East Central Europe," the Central European University's Department of Medieval Studies sought to encourage young scholars of the region to study and to reevaluate the roles and positions of women in medieval history. We aimed at making the medieval experience of the region a little less "tiresome" and more interesting by including women's political and cultural presence - the role and function of queens, princesses, and aristocratic women - into the sphere of exploranda and explananda.

Warfare is one of the central themes of medieval history. Until now, however, there has been no journal dedicated specifically to this area. The Journal of Medieval Military History, the new annual journal of De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History will remedy this situation by publishing top-quality scholarly articles on topics across the full thematic and chronological ranges of the study of war in the middle ages. Medieval society was dominated by men who considered themselves more as soldiers than landlords, judges or administrators. More of society's resources went into fortifications than cathedrals; deeds of arms were a topic rivalled in literature only by love; and in many times and places the common people dreaded war far more than famine or plague. War was the greatest force in determining the evolution of medieval governments. Although the study of war, its conduct and its impact, has never been absent from medieval historiography, the past few decades have seen this field rise to new prominence. Contributors: EMILIE AMT, BERNARD BACHRACH, DOUGLAS BIGGS, CHARLES BOWLUS, JOHN FRANCE, STEPHEN MORILLO, CLIFFORD ROGERS, and J.F. VERBRUGGEN

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.

Cover -- Medieval Europeans -- Contents -- Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on the Contributors -- 1 Law and Ethnic Identity in the Western Kingdoms in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries -- 2 The Emergence of English Identity, 700-1000 -- 3 The Making of England and Germany, 850-1050: Points of Comparison and Difference -- 4 National Identity in Medieval Wales -- 5 John of Fordun and the Independent Identity of the Scots -- 6 Higden's Britain -- 7 'National' Requisitioning for 'Public' Use of 'Private' Castles in Pre-Nation State France -- 8 The Trojan Origins of the French: The Commencement of a Myth's Demise, 1450-1520 -- 9 The Invention of Rus(sia)(s): Some Remarks on Medieval and Modern Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity -- 10 Civic Pride versus Feelings for Italy in the Age of Dante -- 11 The Notion of 'Lombard' and 'Lombardy' in the Middle Ages -- 12 European Nationality, Race and Commonwealth in the Writings of Sir Francis Palgrave, 1788-1861 -- Bibliography -- Index.