The majority are accompanied by their names, written out in middle English, offering an almost unparalleled source of vernacular bird names in common use during the generation after Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales." "This is the first time that all birds form the Sherborne Missal have been reproduced together in sequence and this beautifully illustrated book provides an insight into a fascinating aspect of England's natural history in the middle ages."--BOOK JACKET.

This superbly illustrated study introduction explores its creation and history of the 15th century Sherborne Missal and assesses its importance as a masterpiece in the history of English art.

Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine details the whole scope of scientific knowledge in the medieval period in more than 300 A to Z entries. This resource discusses the research, application of knowledge, cultural and technology exchanges, experimentation, and achievements in the many disciplines related to science and technology. Coverage includes inventions, discoveries, concepts, places and fields of study, regions, and significant contributors to various fields of science. There are also entries on South-Central and East Asian science. This reference work provides an examination of medieval scientific tradition as well as an appreciation for the relationship between medieval science and the traditions it supplanted and those that replaced it. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages website.

This study analyzes the fear of beastly transformation that recurs throughout Medieval literature. Yamamoto explores how humans envisioned animals with human characteristics in bestiaries and literatures that involve aspects of the hunt and heraldry. Minor texts, as well as major works likeChaucer's "Knight's Tale," are investigated. Additionally, she explores both examples of humans changing into animal form and those that hover enigmatically between species as wild men and women. Investigating this topic, she looks to Alexander romances, the poetry of Gower, and othersources.

Food and diet are central to understanding daily life in the middle ages. In the last two decades, the potential for the study of diet in medieval England has changed markedly: historians have addressed sources in new ways; material from a wide range of sites has been processed by zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists; and scientific techniques, newly applied to the medieval period, are opening up possibilities for understanding the cumulative effects of diet on the skeleton. In a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject, this volume, written by leading experts in different fields, unites analysis of the historical, archaeological, and scientific record to provide an up-to-date synthesis. The volume covers the whole of the middle ages from the early Saxon period up to c .1540, and while the focus is on England wider European developments are not ignored. The first aim of the book is to establish how much more is now known about patterns of diet, nutrition, and the use of food in display and social competition; its second is to promote interchange between the methodological approaches of historians and archaeologists. The text brings together much original research, marrying historical and archaeological approaches with analysis from a range of archaeological disciplines, including archaeobotany, archaeozoology, osteoarchaeology, and isotopic studies.

This volume brings together the best of T. C. Smout's recent articles and contributions to books and journals on the topic of environmental history.

Each section of Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts includes relevant details of the manuscripts from which the illustrations are taken, and the concluding section discusses manuscript production in relation to these margins.