The Axe and the Oath - Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages
In The Axe and the Oath, one of the world's leading medieval historians presents a compelling picture of daily life in the Middle Ages as it was experienced by ordinary people. Writing for general readers, Robert Fossier vividly describes how these vulnerable people confronted life, from birth to death, including childhood, marriage, work, sex, food, illness, religion, and the natural world. While most histories of the period focus on the ideas and actions of the few who wielded power and stress how different medieval people were from us, Fossier concentrates on the other nine-tenths of humanity in the period and concludes that "medieval man is us.
This fascinating and important book uses a wealth of contemporary sources to reconstruct the mental world of medieval farmers and, by doing so, argues that there has been a stereotypical interpretation of the middle ages. David Stone overturns the traditional view of medieval countrymen as economically backward and instead reveals that agricultural decision-making was as rational in the fouteenth century as in modern times.
The medieval duchy of Brabant was one of the most powerful principalities of the Low Countries. During the second half of the fourteenth century, it underwent a particularly dramatic period in its history: the House of Leuven was on the point of disappearance, the duchy was coveted by Philip the Bold of Burgundy, who was already dreaming of extending the 'Burgundian Empire' and, by a network of alliances, Brabant was drawn into the Hundred Years' War. The author reviews the successive conflicts which troubled the duchy between 1356 and 1406; ...
The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd ed.
It is widely recognized that the sixteenth-century Reformation remains one of the most fascinating and exciting areas of scholarship. A central and important question, raised by intensive modern research on the Renaissance and late medieval scholasticism, concerns the intellectual origins of the Reformation.
Medieval and Renaissance Humanism - Rhetoric, Representation, and Reform
This volume discusses humanist aspects of medieval and Renaissance intellectual life and thought and of their appropriation by modern history and literature. It charts the humanist representations of the scholarly enterprise, the self-representation of the intellectual, the representation of individuality in humanist literature, as well as the problem field of Renaissance humanism as an ideological programme of educational, moral, and political reform. The volume is particularly useful for medievalists and Renaissance scholars, as well as for historians specialised in the history of medieval and Renaissance art, medicine music and education.
