Books in the Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past series

Drawing on the rich judicial records of Marseille from the years 1264 to 1423, especially records of civil litigation, this book approaches the courts of law from the perspective of the users of the courts.

Ramseyer traces the efforts by the archbishop of Salerno and the abbey of Cava to centralize ecclesiastical structures and standardize religious practices in medieval southern Italy.

A new perspective on the factional conflict between two medieval Jewish sects: the Rabbanites and the Qaraites.

A Common Stage challenges the prevalent understanding of theater history while offering the first comprehensive history of a community often credited with the invention of French as a powerful literary language.

The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections...

This lavishly illustrated book looks at the art and architecture of episcopal palaces as expressions of power and ideology. Tracing the history of the bishop's residence in the urban centers of northern Italy over the Middle Ages, Maureen C. Miller...

This book about poor men and women in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris reveals the other side of the "age of cathedrals" in the very place where gothic architecture and scholastic theology were born. In Surviving Poverty in Medieval...

Spanning the backs of choir stalls above the heads of the canons and their officials, large-scale tapestries of saints' lives functioned as both architectural elements and pictorial narratives in the late Middle Ages. In an extensively illustrated...

During the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the imperial abbey of Farfa was one of the most powerful institutions on the Italian peninsula. In this period many of the lands of central Italy fell under its sway, and it enjoyed the protection of...

Analyzes a broad array of sources-from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts-to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

The Middle Ages are often thought of as an era during which cruelty was a major aspect of life, a view that stems from the anti-Catholic polemics of the Reformation. Daniel Baraz makes the striking discovery that the concept of cruelty, which had been...

Most scholarship in English on the political and social order of early medieval Europe concentrates on the Western Frankish regions. Warren Brown shifts the focus to the East, concentrating on conflicts and their resolutions to learn how a central...

In a major contribution to the debate among medievalists about the nature of social and political change in Europe around the turn of the millennium, Jeffrey A. Bowman explores how people contended over property during the tenth and eleventh centuries...

Before France became France its territories included Occitania, roughly the present-day province of Languedoc. The city of Narbonne was a center of Occitanian commerce and culture during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For most of the second half...

"She declares, so the bishops will write in their report on the council, that she is unworthy to continue as a married woman. 'Before God and his angels' she bares her heart and confesses to them 'every secret relating to the rumor that had arisen.'...

The language of slavery is the last but steep price any society must pay for having tolerated the institution and profited from it.... The hypocrisies, the racism, the sexism, the brutality bound up with the daily practice of slavery live on in...

Reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond.

Order and Exclusion is a rare and magnificent book of medieval history with clear relevance to today's headlines. Through the lens of the polemics of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, Dominique Iogna-Prat examines the process by which christianity...