THE FATE of the remains of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, has long been a mystery. Since his death at the battle of Evesham in 1265, one foot of the dismembered corpse has been confidently traced to Alnwick abbey in Northumberland, from where it disappeared, probably at the Reformation. A skull displayed in the Almonry Museum and Heritage Centre at Evesham may belong to a member of the Montfort family. Stories abound, of secret tunnels under the River Avon, and of remains collected by Montfort's widow and interred in St Mary's abbey, Kenilworth. In this booklet Dr Cox reviews the evidence for an alternative last resting place of Earl Simon's bones, and outlines the circumstances under which they might be recovered and identified. A challenge thus awaits us to provide for Simon de Montfort the discovery and preservation accorded to the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III.

The life and times of one of the most unforgettable figures of the Middle Ages.

First published in 1996. Volume 2 of the International Dictionary of Historical Places covers Northern Europe (British Isles to Russia), out of a set of five. The dictionary spans from Aachen to Ypres and includes an index by country. This five-volume set presents some 1,000 comprehensive and fully illustrated histories of the most famous sites in the world. Entries include location, description, and site details, and a 3,000- to 4,000-word essay that provides a full history of the site and its condition today. An annotated further reading list of books and articles about the site completes each entry.

This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series gathers interdisciplinary voices to present a collection of essays on travel and travel narratives. The essays span a range of topics from iconic ancient travel stories to modern tourism. They discuss travel in the ancient world, modern heroic travels, the literary culture of missionary travel, the intersection of fiction and travel narratives, modern literary traditions and visions of Greece, personal identity, and expatriation. Essays also address travel memoirs, the re-imagining of worlds through travel, transformed landscapes and animals in travel narratives, diplomacy, English women travel writers, and pilgrimage and health in the medieval world. The history of travel writing takes in multiple pursuits: exploration and conquest, religious pilgrimage and missionary work, educational tourism and diplomacy, scientific and personal discovery, and natural history and oral history. As a literary genre, it has enhanced a wide range of disciplines, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. Moreover, twenty-first-century interests in travel and travel writing have produced a global framework that promises to expand travel's theoretical reach into the depths of the Internet, thus challenging our conventional concept of what it means to travel. The fact that travel and travel writing have a prehistory that is embedded in foundational religious texts and ancient narratives of journey, like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, makes both travel and travel writing fundamental and essential expressions of humanity. Travel encourages writing, particularly as epistolary and poetic chronicling. This is clearly a history and tradition that began with human communication and which has kept pace with our collective development.

Gothic Tombs of Kinship is a study of one monumental tomb type in Northern Europe, traced from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. This is the first extensive treatment that recognizes the kinship tomb for what it is, rather than compounding it with its celebrated counterpart, the ceremonial tomb, where the final rites or funeral procession of the deceased are represented. The unique characteristic of a tomb of kinship is that it includes a figurative representation of a family tree. This book establishes the kinship tomb as an important Northern European iconographical type, equal in interest to the ceremonial tomb as a manifestation of the mentality of the late Middle Ages. It traces the development of the type from its inception in France and diffusion in the Low Countries and England until its vulgarization in prefabricated tombstones and alabaster tombs in the fifteenth century. The study demonstrates that after being imported into England in the late thirteenth century, the kinship tomb became a vehicle for Edward III's assertion of his claim to the French throne and, inspired by the king and court, the preferred type of the fourteenth-century English baron. Limited to the princes and knights and their ladies in the thirteenth century, the tomb was adopted by the minor gentry and the middle class by the late fourteenth century, with a corresponding change from an extended family program to one confined to the nuclear family. Gothic Tombs of Kinship identifies a representative number of kinship tombs from the period and the territories that marked their apogee, deciphers their programs, and places them in their cultural context.