What was Christianity like for ordinary people between the turn of the millennium and the coming of the Black Death? What changed and what continued, in their experiences, habits, feelings, hopes, and fears? How did they know themselves to be Christians, and indeed to be good Christians? This book answers those questions through a focus on one specific region — southern France — across a particularly fraught period of history, one beset by the changes wrought by the Gregorian reforms, the spectre of heresy, the violence of crusade, the coming of inquisition, and the pastoral revolution associated with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Using an array of different historical documents, John H. Arnold explores the material contexts of Christian worship from the eleventh through to the fourteenth centuries, the shifting episcopal expectations of the ordinary laity, the changes wrought through wider socioeconomic developments, and periods of sharp inflection brought by the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath. Throughout, the book explores the complex spectrum of lay piety, finding enthusiasms and doubts, faith and scepticism, agency and negotiation. It explores not just developments in the content of faith for the laity but the very dynamics of belief as a lived experience. We are shown how across these key centuries Christianity developed in its external practices, but also via inculcating a more interiorized and affective mode of belief; and thus, it is argued, it can be said to have become truly a 'religion' — a structured, demanding, and rewarding faith — for the many and not just the few.

A rich study of what medieval Christianity meant for ordinary people, and how it changed across the middle ages, arguably as profound as changes in the Reformation period, providing a wider context for medieval Christianity by focusing on southern France in a period mainly known for heresy and for the Church's attack upon heresy.

This book provides an alternative approach to the history of social conflict, popular politics and plebeian culture in the early modern period. Based on a close study of the Peak Country of Derbyshire c.1520–1770, it has implications for understandings of class identity, popular culture, riot, custom and social relations. A detailed reconstruction of economic and social change within the region is followed by an in-depth examination of the changing cultural meanings of custom, gender, locality, skill, literacy, orality and magic. The local history of social conflict sheds light upon the nature of political engagement and the origins of early capitalism. Important insights are offered into early modern social and gender identities, civil war allegiances, the appeal of radical ideas and the making of the English working class. Above all, the book challenges the claim that early modern England was a hierarchical, 'pre-class' society.

After more than 30 years of discussion, negotiations between the Council of Europe and the European Union on the EU's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights have resulted in a Draft Accession Agreement. This will allow the EU to accede to the Convention within the next couple of years. As a consequence, the Union will become subject to the external judicial supervision of an international treaty regime. Individuals will also be entitled to submit applications against the Union, alleging that their fundamental rights have been violated by legal acts rooted in EU law, directly to the Strasbourg Court. As the first comprehensive monograph on this topic, this book examines the concerns for the EU's legal system in relation to accession and the question of whether and how accession and the system of human rights protection under the Convention can be effectively reconciled with the autonomy of EU law. It also takes into account how this objective can be attained without jeopardising the current system of individual human rights protection under the Convention. The main chapters deal with the legal status and rank of the Convention and the Accession Agreement within Union law after accession; the external review of EU law by Strasbourg and the potential subordination of the Luxembourg Court; the future of individual applications and the so-called co-respondent mechanism; the legal arrangement of inter-party cases after accession and the presumable clash of jurisdictions between Strasbourg and Luxembourg; and the interplay between the Convention's subsidiarity principle (the exhaustion of local remedies) and the prior involvement of the Luxembourg Court in EU-related cases. The analysis presented in this book comes at a crucial point in the history of European human rights law, offering a holistic and detailed enquiry into the EU's accession to the ECHR and how this move can be reconciled with the autonomy of EU law.

The study of Old Testament criticism requires the bridges of an important cultural gap because the home of the method and the place of its most creative use is still Germany. In this authoritative work, British scholar John Rogerson discusses two specific questions: how did the critical method arise in Germany in the nineteenth century, and how was its reception into England affected by the theological and philosophical climate? This is the first book which attempts to trace in such detail the impact of German critical method upon scholarship in England. As such it is a valuable contribution to the history of Old Testament scholarship and to the history of ideas. Part I examines German scholarship from 1800-60, from the founder of modern criticism, W. M. L. de Wette, through to the submergence of this early radicalism by the so-called positive criticism, and the confessional orthodoxy led by Hengstenberg. Part II investigates the use of Old Testament criticism in England with particular attention to contacts between Germany and England and to a comparison of the respective intellectual climates. Part III focuses again on German scholarship, particularly on the rebirth of de Wettian ideas, as expressed by Julius Wellhausen. It explains how the reception of Wellhausen in England involved a modification of his position in the light of neo-Hegelian philosophy.

This textbook provides a one-of-a-kind view of the history of the Western world. It weaves together all strands of history into easily grasped, chronologically organized chapters.-Back cover.

A 2006 investigation of the idea of the powerful Asian empires in the works of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift.