Books by Theodore Evergates

In this engaging biography, Theodore Evergates offers a rounded view of Countess Marie of France as both a cultural patron and a successful ruler of Champagne, one of the wealthiest and most vibrant principalities in medieval France.

Henry the Liberal was celebrated for balancing the arts of governance with learning and for his generosity and inquisitive mind, but his enduring achievement, Evergates makes clear, was to transform the county of Champagne into a dynamic principality within the emerging French state.

Provides an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne under the independent counts. This work argues that three factors, the rise of the comital state, fiefholding, and the conjugal family, were critical to shaping a loose assortment of baronial and knightly families into an aristocracy with shared customs, institutions, and identity.

"This elegantly written volume turns upside down prejudices and idees recues concerning society, family, and women in the Middle Ages."-The Medieval Review