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For many medieval historians, royal inauguration means a coronation ceremony, generally at a long-established church, often a cathedral. In Ireland however, inauguration ceremonies mostly took place at special open-air assembly places.

As a reviewer who regards himself as a pioneer in the study of medieval sexuality, I judge this book as the best short introduction to medieval sexuality that I have read. The first chapter is an outstanding examination of the problems of writing about sex in medieval Europe.

The Hanged Man is a fascinating account of a miracle and its context. Robert Bartlett, a medieval historian well known for his earlier work on ordeal, conquest, the expansion of Europe and the lives of saints, combines his many fields of expertise in order to analyse the story of one man's death and alleged resurrection.

Quite a lot of work on the history of marriage is based on assumptions that reflect the authors' views about contemporary society: either that marriage is necessary for an ordered society and that anything that strengthens it is good, or that marriage is oppressive to women.

In recent decades, the fields of women's and gender studies have rapidly expanded. In trying to understand women's roles in past societies, historians have paid particular attention to issues surrounding marriage, family, and the household.

Of the importance of history to the Carolingians there can be no doubt, though they were perhaps less concerned with the events of their own time than with the lessons to be drawn from past events.

The main aim of this book (1) is to provide a social history of the religious architecture commissioned in the kingdom of Naples under three generations of French kings (from the conquest of Charles of Anjou in 1266 to the death of his grandson, Robert the Wise in 1343).

The work under review here owes its genesis to the Open University course of the same title, for which it is the core text. As such, it consists of ten interlinked essays, specially commissioned, on the broad theme of the dynamics of difference within and between world religious traditions.

For medievalists, the long-awaited appearance of Gerald Harriss’s volume in the New Oxford History of England constitutes a major publishing event. In this superb study a leading academic historian, K. B. McFarlane’s successor at Magdalen, offers an authoritative summing-up of a period which saw medieval England transformed.

This is a fascinating and much-welcomed addition to the steadily increasing body of work on medieval queenship that has emerged with the development of this (still) fresh historical discipline over the last twenty years.