Although he was a poet in the 14th century, French writer Jean Froissart is best known for his historical work «Chronicles.» In the work, he explained the events leading up to the Hundred Years' War, and then detailed the battles, strategies, and key figures for the first fifty years of the war. «Chronicles» provides an excellent glimpse into Renaissance history and politics, as well as providing the opinion of a Frenchman on the war itself ...
The late Byzantine period was a time characterized by both civil strife and foreign invasion, framed by two cataclysmic events: the fall of Constantinople to the western Europeans in 1204 and again to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Mark C. Bartusis here opens an extraordinary window on the Byzantine Empire during its last centuries by providing the first comprehensive treatment of the dying empire's military. Although the Byzantine army was hi ...
Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans , Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Me ...
A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and Jews In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named Edward because they «wanted to make him a Jew.» Contemporaneous accounts of the «Norwich circumcision case,» as it came to be called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder. Contextualizing and anal ...
