This book provides a needed overview of the scholarship on medieval public culture and popular movements such as the Peace of God, heresy, and the crusades and illustrates how a changing sense of the populus, the importance of publics and public opinion and public spheres was influential in the evolution of medieval cultures. Public opinion did play an important role, even in the Middle Ages; it did not wait until the era of modern history to do so. Using modern research on such aspects of culture as textual communities, large and small publics, cults, crowds, rumor, malediction, gossip, dispute resolution and the European popular revolution, the author focuses on the Peace of God movement, the era of Church reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the rise and combat of heresy, the crusades, and the works of fourteenth-century political thinkers such as Marsiglio of Padua regarding the role of the populus as the basis for the analysis. The pattern of changes reflected in this study argues that just as in the modern world the simplistic idea of “the public‎” was a phantom. Instead there were publics large and small that were influential in shaping the cultures of the era under review.

The essays in this volume portray the public life of late medieval France as that country established its position as a leader of western European society in the early modern world. A central theme is the contribution made by contemporary writers, chroniclers and commentators, such as Jean Froissart, William Worcester and Philippe de Commynes, to our understanding of the past. Who were they? What picture of their times did they present? Were their works intended to influence their contemporaries and what success did they enjoy? Other contributions deal with the exercise of political power, the relationship between the court and those in authority in far-flung reaches of the kingdom, and the role and status of the death penalty as deterrent, punishment and means of achieving justice. "... a very valuable overview of recent work on the interface between the intellectual and the political history of the Valois realm."—De Re Militari Online "... this collection will be of particular interest to literary scholars as well as historians in view of the emphasis of many of the essays on representations above event or record."—Medium Aevum

How did the kings of England and France govern their kingdoms? This volume, the product of a ten-year international project, brings together specialists in late medieval England and France to explore the multiple mechanisms by which monarchs exercised their power in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. Collaborative chapters, mostly co-written by experts on each kingdom, cover topics ranging from courts, military networks and public finance; office, justice and the men of the church; to political representation, petitioning, cultural conceptions of political society; and the role of those excluded from formal involvement in politics. The result is a richly detailed and innovative comparison of the nature of government and political life, seen from the point of view of how the king ruled his kingdom, but bringing to bear the methods of social, cultural and economic history to understand the underlying armature of royal power.

Centering on the streets of this metropolis, Simone Roux peers into the secret lives of people within their homes and the public world of affairs and entertainments, populating the book with laborers, shop keepers, magistrates, thieves, and strollers.