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This edition investigates the Norman Conquest from a number of perspectives, examining the dynamics of colonisation & exploring the effect of the Norman settlement in a number of key areas, including government, military organisation & the Church.
Exploring the successful Norman invasion of England in 1066, this concise and readable book focuses especially on the often dramatic and enduring changes wrought by William the Conqueror and his followers. From the perspective of a modern social historian, Hugh M. Thomas considers the conquest's wide-ranging impact by taking a fresh look at such traditional themes as the influence of battles and great men on history and assessing how far the shift in ruling dynasty and noble elites affected broader aspects of English history. The author sets the stage by describing English society before the Norman Conquest and recounting the dramatic story of the conquest, including the climactic Battle of ...
This book traces the development of monasticism in England, Scotland and Wales from the last half century of Anglo-Saxon England to 1300. It explores the nature of the impact of the Norman settlement on monastic life, and how Britain responded to new, European ideas on monastic life. In particular, it examines Britain's response to the needs of religious women. It covers every aspect of the life and work of the religious orders: their daily life, the buildings in which they lived, their contribution to intellectual developments and to the economy. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between religious houses and their founders and patrons. This shows the degree of dependence of religious houses on local patrons. Indeed, one major theme which emerges from the book is the constant tension between the ideals of monastic communities and the demands of the world.
Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also resided over a magnificent court. This book uses records of his reign to reconstruct his life at court, and explore how it produced both pleasure and soft power for the king.
Thornton also sheds light on areas where popular culture and politics were uneasily interlinked: the powerful political influence of those outside elite groups; the variations in political culture across the country; and the considerable continuing power of mystical, supernatural, and 'non-rational' ideas in British social and political life into the nineteenth century."--Jacket.
In the Middle Ages writers were still deeply involved in the legal and linguistic consequences of the Norman victory. Later, the issues became directly relevant to debates about constitutional rights; the theory of a "Norman yoke" provided first a call for revolution and, by the nineteenth century, a romantic vision of a lost Saxon paradise. When history became a subject for academic study, controversies still raged around such subjects as Saxon versus Norman institutions. The debates are still going on. Interest has now moved to such subjects as peoples and races, frontier societies, women's studies and colonialism.
Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition presents a chronological picture of the development of monastic thought and prayer from the early English Church (Bede, Adomnan) through to the 17th Century and William Law's religious community at King's Cliffe. Essays interact with different facets of monastic life, assessing the development and contribution of figures such as Boniface, the Venerable Bede, Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. The varying modes and outputs of the monastic life of prayer are considered, with focus on the use of different literary techniques in the creation of monastic documents, the interaction between monks and the laity, the creation of prayers and the purpose and structure of prayer in different contexts. The volume also discusses the nature of translation of classic monastic works, and the difficulties the translator faces. The highly distinguished contributors include; G.R. Evans, Sarah Foot, Henry Mayr-Harting, Brian McGuire, Henry Wansbrough and Rowan Williams.
This volume is an attempt to discuss the ways in which themes of authority and gender can be traced in the writing of chronicles and chronicle-like writings from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With major contributions by fourteen authors, each of them specialists in the field, this study spans full across the compass of medieval and early modern Europe, from England and Scandinavia, to Byzantium and the Crusader Kingdoms; embraces a variety of media and methods; and touches evidence from diverse branches of learning such as language and literature, history and art, to name just a few. This is an important collection which will be of the highest utility for students and scholars of language, literature, and history for many years to come.
Takes its place as perhaps the finest available study of a house for women religious. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEWThe fifteenth-century cartulary of the Benedictine nunnery of Chatteris Abbey in Cambridgeshire (founded in the early eleventh century) has important implications for the study of women religious, especially in the light of the small number of surviving cartularies from English nunneries, yet until now it has received little attention, perhaps due to its damage in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. This critical edition of the manuscript, which contains documents copied into it from the mid-twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, offers a full transcription, together with historical notes...