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In a famous essay on the tenacity of the Burckhardtian conception of the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga wrote that '[A]t the sound of the word ‘Renaissance’ the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.' After reading Carole Collier Frick’s engrossing, multi-layered book, Huizinga’s romantic dreamers will have to become far more nuanced in their visual imaginings of the past.
The study of masculinity as a specific topic (rather than an implicit element) is not utterly new: work in sociology in the 1980s, cultural studies in the 1990s, and concerns of feminist criticism from much earlier have laid the foundations for studying how men set about being men. Historians have also engaged with the topic, most notably in work on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On 13 April 1204 the western or Latin armies participating in the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. The approaching 800th anniversary of that event has generated renewed interest in the background, context and impact of that crusade, expressed in several new studies and in conferences.
This exciting new study argues that medieval aristocratic women not only had power to exercise authority, but that they did so in different capacities depending on the times of their life cycle.
Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany is the first English version, slightly revised, of a study that was previously published in an Italian translation (Legge, Practiche e Conflitti [Rome: Viella libreria editrice, 2000]).
This is an ambitious book, attempting as it does to span the whole of Europe and cover six hundred years of urbanism. It is also ambitious in trying to bridge the conventional divide drawn between the ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ ages usually placed by historians and archaeologists somewhere between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In 1992 a conference was held at Reading to study the changing relations between England and Normandy that resulted from the conquest of 1066.(1) Some ten years later, after a period of intense historical investigation, a colloque at Cerisy-la-Salle re-examined the questions raised at Reading and assessed the ways in which historical understanding of t
'Noonan did not read polyptychs, and Duby did not read these penitentials.' (p. 185).
One of the most difficult, and under-rated, jobs undertaken by the historian is that of the synthesis. Text books covering long periods of historical time demand the exclusion of vast quantities of material.
This collection is a new addition to Blackwell’s 'Essential Readings in History' series, which reprints important academic articles on historical topics.