"This is the first comprehensive study of loans and debts in Central European countries in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. It outlines the issues of debts and loans in the Czech lands, Poland and Hungary, with respect to the influence of Austria and Germany. It focuses on the role of loans and debts in medieval and early modern society, credit markets in these countries, the mechanism of lending and borrowing, forms of credit, availability of loans, frequency of credits dealings, range of lending business, and last, but not least, the financial relationships inside the social classes and between them. The research presented in the book is based on a wide range of resources including credit contracts and agreements, evidence of loans and debts of courts, accounting of nobility, towns, church and guilds, merchant diaries and Jewish registers, as well as other financial records. It covers a wide range of historical disciplines including economic and financial history, social history, the history of economic thought as well as the history of everyday life. It also contains a wealth of case studies, which offer, for the first time in English, a comprehensive and representative sample of the most up-to-date Central European research on the history of loans and debts and serves as a basis for a comparison with the other parts of Europe during the same period. The book is designed primarily for postgraduates, researchers and academics in financial, economic and historical sciences but will also be a valuable resource for students of business schools"--

This volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess' disability affected her life as Byzantine empress, how one unmarried Transylvanian woman who got pregnant dealt with being the center of a court case, and how enslaved women in medieval Hungary were treated as sexual property. The hope with this volume is that it will show the many interdisciplinary ways that women on the margins can be studied in this region, and to diminish the taboo of discussing this topic to begin with.

Discusses the techniques, uses, and aesthetics of medieval drawings; and reproduces work from more than fifty manuscripts produced between the ninth and early fourteenth century.

“A masterful . . . intellectual and religious history of late medieval and Reformation Europe.”—Christianity Today"A learned, humane, and expressive book."—Gerald Strauss, Renaissance QuarterlyThe seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations—both Protestant and Catholic—of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society.

This wide-ranging introduction to medieval Europe has been updated and revised. In his popular survey Brooke explores the variety of human experience in the period. He looks at society, economy, religious life and popular religion, learning, culture, as well as political events; the rise of the Normans and the heyday of the medieval Empire. For the new edition there is increased coverage of the role of women and more attention to central Europe, Bohemia, Hungary and Poland.

This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.