A comprehensive introduction to medieval England surveying the years from the departure of the Roman legions to the Battle of Bosworth.

'The individual chapters are scholarly and up to the minute, without loss of accessibility or pace. The illustrations are many, apposite and refreshingly unhackneyed.' -Times Literary Supplement

This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function. This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work. Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.

'the volume will indeed be a treasury for pictorial sources, and the illustrations to more off-the-beaten-track chapters (especially Noonan's, on European Russia) are correspondingly unusual.' -Guy Halsall, War in History, 8, 3, 2001'the truest picture yet of the Vikings and their age.' -Publishing News

Beginning with the merger of Roman, Christian, and Germanic cultures, this history of the Middle Ages covers a vast array of subjects, including Byzantium and the Islamic world, feudalism, the Crusades, the Magna Carta, and much more. Author Barbara A. Hanawalt uses a lively and anecdotal writing style to breathe life into earlier times. 35 color and 120 b & w illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

In 14 original essays, this book reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation is the story of one of the truly epochal events in world history -- and how it helped create the world we live in today