English Medieval History

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks are mind-boggling evidence of a 15th-century scientific genius standing at the edge of the modern world, basing his ideas on observation and experimentation. This book will change children’s ideas of who Leonardo was and what it means to be a scientist.

In the year 1553, King Edward VI has turned sixteen. His minority has come to an end. He is ready to rule England as the next Tudor King and Head of the Church of England. However, his Catholic sister Lady Mary poses a threat to his dream of a ruling over a united godly nation.

One of the best-known Arthurian stories—adapted many times into verse, prose, games, and film. It recounts an adventure undertaken by King Arthur’s famous nephew, Sir Gawain, who is brave and the model of knightly grace. When a mysterious knight in green armor issues a challenge to the Round Table, the gallant Gawain volunteers to do battle for his king, beginning an adventure that explores chivalric tradition, loyalty, and the virtue of forgiveness, as well as alchemical symbolism and the psychological process of individuation.

If you want to discover the captivating history of Medieval England and Magna Carta, then get England in the Middle Ages - a set of two books about England during the Middle Ages and the influence of the Magna Carta.

Much of what is known of the Norse myths comes from the 10th century onwards. Until this time and for centuries afterwards, Norse culture (particularly that of Iceland, where the myths were eventually transcribed) was an oral culture. In fact, in all Scandinavian countries well into the 13th century laws were memorized by officials known as “Lawspeakers” who recited them at the “Thing.” The Thing was the legislative assembly in Scandinavia “held for judicial purposes".

His mother and father lived and died carrying rocks. His grandparents too. Even his neighbor's carr...well, you get the idea. Gerard's future seems carved in the rock-strewn soil, condemning him to a life of the same. When an unexpected revelation leads to his unlikely freedom, Gerard takes the opportunity to dedicate himself to the thing he loves most: listening to live music.

In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last 10 months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons.

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod lived around the same time as Homer. He is considered to be an economist and also wrote works on mythology, ancient time-keeping, and farming techniques. The Hesiod Collection includes The Shield of Heracles, Theogony (the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods), and Works and Days (a farmer’s almanac in which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the art of agriculture).

Today, Russia is the biggest and one of the most populous countries in the world. From the early, primitive state-like formations in the 9th century, all the way to the creation of the first true tsardom of Russia in 1547, the history of medieval Russia is one filled with constant struggles for power, personal rivalries between various princes, bloody wars, and a search for identity.

After a long period of uneventful sieges and skirmishing, lasting from the death of Edward III in 1377 until the accession of Henry V in 1413, The Hundred Years War is suddenly and dramatically fanned into full fledged war in a third and final phase. Henry V is determined to end the conflict once and for all on the field of battle. After assembling an army, he crosses to Calais in 1415 and marches toward Paris.

England, 1455 - King Henry VI is proving to be an unstable monarch, prone to bouts of mysterious illness and susceptible to manipulation from others. Richard of York, the most powerful magnate in the land, steps in to manage affairs whilst Henry is unwell. Many people prefer York's rule, which does not please the queen. The country begins to divide and plots start to hatch. York himself is directly descended from the royal family line, in fact, a little more directly than Henry, but he puts this fact aside and strives only to serve the king.

Timothy Venning's series of alternative histories explores the pathways of British events from the Anglo-Saxon Age to the English Civil War. In this volume, he presents an in-depth analysis of the Tudor period. Venning discusses the fateful moments at which history could easily have taken a different turn. In a fascinating series of "what if" scenarios, Venning presents a detailed look at the possible and likely results. While speculative, the scenarios are all plausible and rooted in a firm understanding of actually events and their context.

Taking a similar approach to his successful If Rome Hadn't Fallen, Timothy Venning explores the various decision points in a fascinating period of British history and the alternative paths that it might have taken. Dr. Timothy Venning starts within an outline of the process by which much of Britain came to be settled by Germanic tribes after the end of Roman rule, as far as it can be determined from the sparse and fragmentary sources. He then moves on to discuss a series of scenarios, which might have altered the course of subsequent history dramatically.

The history of Western thought contains hundreds of statements by philosophers testifying to the use of esoteric writing in their own work or others'. Despite this well-documented history, however, esotericism is often dismissed today as a rare occurrence. But by ignoring esotericism, we risk cutting ourselves off from a full understanding of Western philosophical thought. Arthur M. Melzer serves as our guide in this engaging history of philosophical esotericism. Walking listeners through both an ancient and a modern esoteric work, he explains what esotericism is - and is not.

Virginal, chaste, humble, patiently waiting for rescue by brave knights and handsome princes: this idealized—and largely mythical—notion of the medieval noblewoman still lingers. Yet the reality was very different, as Kelcey Wilson-Lee shows in this vibrant account of the five daughters of Edward I, often known as Longshanks. The lives of these sisters—Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth—ran the gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages.

In 1144 the mutilated body of William of Norwich, a young apprentice leatherworker, was found abandoned outside the city's walls. The boy bore disturbing signs of torture, and a story spread that it was a ritual murder, performed by Jews, in imitation of the Crucifixion as a mockery of Christianity. The outline of William's tale eventually gained currency far beyond Norwich, and the idea that Jews engaged in ritual murder became firmly rooted in the European imagination.

In prose as crystalline as his view to the Pyrenees on a clear day, Allman animates Lauzerte and its surrounding communities—Cahors, Moissac, Montauban—all ever in thrall to the magnetic impulse of Paris. Witness to so many dramas over the centuries, his house comes alive as a historical protagonist in its own right, from its wine-cellar cave to the roof where he wages futile battle with pigeons, to the life lessons it conveys. “The onward march of history, my House keeps demonstrating, never takes a rest,” he observes, pulling us vividly into his world.

Following the fall of Rome in 476 CE, the entire dynamic of Europe underwent a complete shift in power and culture. The Dark Ages was an interesting period of about six centuries, and during it, Europe was still trying to figure out what it was and how it would survive the chaos that followed the fall of Rome.

Samarkand is one of the oldest cities of Central Asia, founded nearly 3,000 years ago. The legendary city was the capital of the Sogdians, a trading people who facilitated the spread of commodities, religions, technologies, and ideas across the Silk Road between China and the rest of Eurasia. Samarkand was a key site along the ancient Silk Road, a place where a number of world cultures from the East and the West met and assimilated.

On a frosty morning sometime in the 14th century, in a village somewhere in England, a girl known only as Brat was sleeping in a dung heap. "You, girl. Are you alive or dead?" When she opened her eyes, she saw an important-looking woman with a sharp glance and a sharp nose and a wimple starched into sharp pleats. This woman was Jane the midwife, and she needed a helper....