"The ability to summon is passed down through the blood..." Summoner: One who is gifted with the ability to summon demonic creatures that are emotionally connected to their human counterparts. As brought to life in the bestselling Summoner series, the magic of summoning is also an art, with a story of its own. The Summoner’s Handbook reveals the story of James Baker -- the epic journal that inspired the series hero, Fletcher, to discover his own summoning abilities. Along with a complete demonology, a guide to the basics of summoning, and glorious artwork from the world of the Hominum Empire, this is the volume that fans of the acclaimed and bestselling series must own.

Skybound dives into the wondrous world of Summoners War, the popular mobile game where magical monsters are summoned in a never-ending battle of good vs. evil! Rai knows there’s only one way out of her nothing town—to become a summoner! But when she’s recruited by Abuus Dein as an apprentice, she embarks on the adventure of a lifetime and is thrust into a war for the fate of the world. Journey to Alea alongside JUSTIN JORDAN (THE STRANGE TALENT OF LUTHER STRODE, REAVER) and newcomer LUCA CLARETTI for an action-packed fantasy like none other!

He can summon demons. But can he win a war? Fletcher is working as a blacksmith's apprentice when he discovers he has the rare ability to summon demons from another world. Chased from his village for a crime he did not commit, Fletcher must travel with his demon, Ignatius, to an academy for adepts, where the gifted are taught the art of summoning. Along with nobles and commoners, Fletcher endures grueling lessons that will prepare him to serve as a Battlemage in the Empire's war against the savage Orcs. But sinister forces infect new friendships and rivalries grow. With no one but Ignatius by his side, Fletcher must decide where his loyalties lie. The fate of the Empire is in his hands.

In Ernest Games Carl Lindahl recovers a folkloric world long hidden from readers of Chaucer. Lindahl is the first critic to demonstrate how the poem reflects the social and artistic patterns of medieval folk performance. Combining current approaches from the fields of literary criticism, social history, and folklore, Earnest Games begins with a study of Chaucer's setting and characters. Lindahl discovers that Chaucer gives each community -- the gentils, the churls, and the pilgrims -- a game strategy that faithfully reflects the social realities of the English Middle Ages.

The epic conclusion to the New York Times–bestselling Summoner trilogy, by Taran Matharu! Fletcher and his friends fight for survival in the ether, where they pursue a mortally dangerous quest to rebuild their world and broker peace. Even as hatred threatens to turn friend into foe in The Battlemage, Fletcher must lead a small army of soldiers into battle to protect his ancestral homeland, and face his biggest challenge yet: his nemesis, the albino orc, Khan, who seeks to destroy everything Fletcher holds dear.

The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.