Crusade and Christendom

annotated documents in translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291

In 1213, Pope Innocent III issued his letter Vineam Domini, thundering against the enemies of Christendom-the "beasts of many kinds that are attempting to destroy the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth"-and announcing a General Council of the Latin Church as redress. The Fourth ...

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

The enslaved population of medieval Iberia composed only a small percentage of the general populace at any given point, and slave labor was not essential to the regional economy during the period. Yet slaves were present in Iberia from the beginning of recorded history until ...

Medieval Iberia

Reading from christian, muslim and jewish sources

For some historians, medieval Iberian society was one marked by peaceful coexistence and cross-cultural fertilization; others have sketched a harsher picture of Muslims and Christians engaged in an ongoing contest for political, religious, and economic advantage culminating in the fall of Muslim Granada and the ...

Affective meditation and the invention of medieval compassion

This book offers a new history of a major medieval genre, affective meditations on the Passion. It argues that women were instrumental in the creation of this genre, and it illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as ...

Paris in the middle ages

Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty, mountebanks, Knights Templar, merchants, prostitutes, and canons. Bursting outward from the encompassing wall, it was Europe's largest, most cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians over the course of a dozen generations as ...

From boys to men

formations of masculinity in late medieval Europe

"The book . . . will find a broad audience. It would work well in the classroom. . . . Effectively combating the nonspecialist's view of the Middle Ages as a monolithic and static society, it will encourage more subtle thinking about gender identities in the past and in the ...

Las Siete Partidas

Vol.1: The medieval Church: the world of clerics and laymen

Las Siete Partidas, or Seven Divisions, is the major law code of thirteenth-century Spain, compiled by Alfonso X the Learned of Castile. Seven centuries later, this compendium of legal and customary information remains the foundation of modern Spanish law. In addition, its influence is notable ...

The romance of adultery

queenship and sexual transgression in old french literature