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Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) is a figure who is often overshadowed by her famous relatives, including her grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine, her sister Blanche of Castile and her son Fernando III of Castile and León.
This dense, lengthy and – by the author’s own admission – ‘very difficult’ book (p. xi) tackles complex questions of power in one of the most contested and formative periods of Frankish history, between the death of Louis the Pious and the formal accession of the Capetians as kings of West Francia.
It is a brave man who would take on the job of writing a history of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire between 1493 and 1806. Many historians would maintain that neither Germany nor even German national consciousness (certainly not German nationalism) existed during this period; as for the Holy Roman Empire, there is a long-running dispute over what it actually amounted to.
Normandy and its Neighbours, 900-1250: Essays for David Bates / eds. David Crouch, Kathleen Thompson
David Bates’ career as a leading Norman and Anglo-Norman historian has bridged the channel through his extensive engagement with the scholarly community on both shores. Most recently, he has held the post of professeur invité at l’Université de Caen Basse-Normandie and is professor emeritus at the University of East Anglia.
The study of nationality (a term used to designate historically and constitutively diverse nations) poses a number of acute methodological, historical, and philosophical problems.
Hitherto, the historiography of ‘city-states’ has in general not been comparative, preferring to focus on one city, or one region, rather than taking a European perspective.
Jan Guillou is a well-known Swedish author, journalist and political commentator.
‘When medieval men and women thought and wrote about power in the early Middle Ages – what it was, what it should be, what it had been – peace was never far from their thoughts’ (p. 271). Thus writes Paul Kershaw in the last paragraph of this important work on the ideas behind rulership but it explains perfectly the previous 270-odd pages.
The Carolingian period has long been seen as one of endings (of the Roman world; of the world of an integrated Mediterranean economy and culture) and even more, of beginnings (of the middle ages proper; of feudalism; of the nations that now make up western Europe; of Europe itself).
This splendid volume of essays addresses the late Philip Jones’s seminal contribution to the historiography of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, and takes its title directly from his most well-known and influential article on the subject. Both the topic and the timing of this publication are propitious.