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Almost all the great medieval shrines disappeared at the Reformation, yet for several centuries they were the outward and visible sign of the spiritual benefits believed to flow from proximity to the saint's body, and an important witness to the spiritual life of the middle ages. They were the focal point of prayer and pilgrimage, but also a critical economic factor in the life of the church. This first study devoted to cathedral shrines draws on surviving cathedral records to describe their nature and development in England from around 1066 to 1540. The development of the shrine itself, the monument enclosing the saint's body, is followed, and the connections between the chapel around the shrine and changes in church architecture considered. Accounts of the cathedral clergy who built and managed the shrines, the pilgrims who visited them, and the fluctuating fortunes of the cathedrals which housed them complete the book. BEN NILSON is College Professor at Okanagan University College, Canada. ... Read more

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B> The latest book in the Longman History of Medieval England Series,Late Medieval England, 1399-1509 transforms our understanding of the period and offers a significant and vital reappraisal of this critical English age.Drawing together political, economic, social and religious considerations, the clear chronological framework brings the age of the wars of the Roses to life while putting forth the idea that, far from being a century dominated by destructive civil strife, England's late medieval culture was marked by stability and development as a new modern society emerged. The book ranges from the reign of Henry IV to the closing of the middle ages with Henry VII, covering the Lancastrian dynasty, the wake of the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses and the Accession of the Tudors. The political narrative is interspersed with analysis of institutional structures and the role of the church and state. For readers interested in British history or Medieval history. Hardcover 0-582-03134-6$ 79.95y ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Indespensable
I'm not sure why it's so expensive... I got this in England for $20... maybe it's just the current state of the dollar. (Edit: the price has gone down a lot since I wrote this review: I think it was about $60 when I wrote that comment)

Anyways, this is a comprehensive companion to medieval England.It is short and sweet, with simple, well-written entries for everything from Advowson (the right of a patron to fill a vacant benefice) to York.It is chock full of pictures, diagrams, and maps to illustrate many of the entries and concepts.

Anyone who dabbles in medieval history (even if you would just like certain things in historical novels explained) would benefit from having this book handy.Perhaps go to amazon.co.uk to see if it could be had for less? ... Read more

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This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores the accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death, and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as 'clerical' and 'lay', 'popular' and 'elite', 'Christian' and 'pagan' as explanatory categories. The evidence of the chronicles is also set in its broader context through explorations of miracle collections, penitential manuals, exempla and sermons. The book traces shifts in the way the supernatural was conceptualized by learned writers and the ways in which broader patterns of belief evolved during this period. This original account sheds important light on belief during a period in which the religious landscape was transformed. ... Read more

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Food and diet are central to understanding daily life in the middle ages. In the last two decades, the potential for the study of diet in medieval England has changed markedly: historians have addressed sources in new ways; material from a wide range of sites has been processed by zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists; and scientific techniques, newly applied to the medieval period, are opening up possibilities for understanding the cumulative effects of diet on the skeleton. In a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject, this volume, written by leading experts in different fields, unites analysis of the historical, archaeological, and scientific record to provide an up-to-date synthesis. The volume covers the whole of the middle ages from the early Saxon period up to c .1540, and while the focus is on England wider European developments are not ignored.

The first aim of the book is to establish how much more is now known about patterns of diet, nutrition, and the use of food in display and social competition; its second is to promote interchange between the methodological approaches of historians and archaeologists. The text brings together much original research, marrying historical and archaeological approaches with analysis from a range of archaeological disciplines, including archaeobotany, archaeozoology, osteoarchaeology, and isotopic studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Exhaustive yet comprehensive. Worth the price.
I have neither the time nor inclination (much less the credentials) to provide a suitable review for this book.

I will however point you to the 'limited preview' provided by Google books where can read almost four chapters of the book at your leisure (as I did before purchasing).

[...]

Edit May 10th
Ahh.. I provided a link, but apparently Amazon doesn't allow that sort thing. Just google the title and you'll be able to find it in google books and read to your heart's content. ... Read more

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The lower ecclesiastical courts were among the most important law courts encountered by ordinary English people in the Middle Ages, dispensing the justice of medieval canon law in its criminal guise. This volume presents documents from two of these ecclesiastical courts, providing valuable insights into the social history of late medieval England. ... Read more

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In this collection of essays, Antonia Gransden brings out the virtues of medieval writers and highlights their attitudes and habits of thought. She traces the continuing influence of Bede, the greatest of early medieval English historians, from his death to the sixteenth century. Bede's clarity and authority were welcomed by generations of monastic historians. At the other end is a humble fourteenth-century chronicle produced at Lynn with little to add other than a few local references.
... Read more

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The first study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman canals and waterways, this book is based on new evidence surrounding the nature of water transport in the period. England is naturally well-endowed with a network of navigable rivers, especially the easterly systems draining into the Thames, Wash and Humber. The central middle ages saw innovative and extensive development of this network, including the digging of canals bypassing difficult stretches of rivers, or linking rivers to important production centres. The eleventh and twelfth centuries seem to have been the high point for this dynamic approach to water-transport: after 1200, the improvement of roads and bridges increasingly diverted resources away from the canals, many of which stagnated with the reassertion of natural drainage patterns.

The new perspective presented in this study has an important bearing on the economy, landscape, settlement patterns and inter-regional contacts of medieval England. Essays from economic historians, geographers, geomorphologists, archaeologists, and place-name scholars unearth this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and economic growth. ... Read more

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This book tells one part of the long history of the institution of marriage. Questions concerning the formation and annulment of marriage came under the exclusive jurisdiction of the church courts during the Middle Ages. Drawing on unpublished records of these courts, Professor Helmholz describes the practical side of matrimonial jurisdiction and relates it to his outline of the formal law of marriage. He investigates the nature of the cases heard, the procedure used, the people involved and changes over the period covered, all of which add to what is known about marriage and legal practice in medieval England. The concluding assessment of canonical jurisdiction over marriage suggests that the application of the law was more successful than is usually thought. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Best nonfiction book EVER!
Very few lawsuits in Medieval England, concerning marriage, were for divorce; in fact, most lawsuits were actually demanding that the two people in question were married and not single.Weird, huh....

This book confronts many commonly held views on medieval marriage.It was originally a Ph.D. dissertation by Helmholz, but it reads more smoothly and is more engaging than most fiction books.Part of what makes it so interesting is that the book primarily deals with people who are not from the nobility.Other books, such as Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History) or The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, both by Georges Duby, or The Medieval Idea of Marriage, by Christopher Brooke, only focus on the nobility, leaving the reader to wonder what the other 90% of the population did about marriage.Granted, the sources used by Helmholz are limited in scope (as any primary source), and they have the disadvantage of being recollections from courtroom proceedings, having been translated by the clergy recording the transactions from the native tongue to Latin.Nevertheless, these court records reveal astonishing characteristics of medieval marriage.Marriages were often contracted on the fly: grab a couple witnesses, declare marriage (this got sticky with present and future intentions and corresponding consummation), and *pow* you're married.Easy as 1, 2, 3, and yet so complicated as to leave an abundance (relatively speaking) of records.
You don't have to hold a Ph.D. in History or be obsessed with medieval history to appreciate this book.It's not a cheap book, but this is a great book and time well spent reading it. ... Read more

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This is part of an eight-volume series providing short biographies of men and women from Roman to Victorian times. Each entry places the subject in the context of their age and evokes what was distinctive and interesting about their personality and achievement. The biographies are arranged in a broadly chronological rather than alphabetical sequence so that the reader may easily browse from one contemporary to the next. The index, with its many cross-references, reveals further linkages between contemporaries. Each volume is a portrait of an age, presenting history in a biographical form which complements the conventional approach. ... Read more

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nifty reference to from Edward I to Richard III
A wonderful quick references covering political figures in England turbulent Middle Ages from 1272-1485.Think of the changes going on in this period!Longshanks tried to forge Scotland, Wales and Ireland into a jewel of the English crown.The violent murder of Edward the Second, the death of the Black Prince, the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses.A lot of men and women who were movers and shakers and played pivotal roles in Britain's history to keep straight.

For lovers of history, who need a "road map" from time to time, to fictional writers need to quick refresh on the many faces of the period, this is wonderful resource.Over 200 different biographies, daring on modern scholars works, it conveys more than the bare bone facts.Hicks gives a richer detailed understanding of the figure and places them in the proper political context.

It's easy to use, arranged in chronological order rather than the general A-Z that places the person in the proper grouping to understand their interaction with other people of the period, the book is readable as a BOOK from cover to cover, or perfect for the quick need reference.

The 3rd volume in the Who's Who in British History series - all are highly recommended for both the armchair historian and the fictional writers of the period. ... Read more

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The studies in this volume are broadly concerned with ecclesiastical history as envisaged in the work of Orderic Vitalis - the history of society and culture, comprising the life and activities of lay men and women in war and peace no less than those of monks and clerks, with a special emphasis on monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon world. Some enlarge directly on Orderic's work; others deal with aspects of the life of the Empress Matilda, and with St Anselm and Bec-Hellouin. The underlying themes, in addition to history as written by both monks and secular clerks and its sources in chronicles and charters are piety (including the mixed motives of monastic patrons) and power in both church and state and the conflicts these engendered. It has been said that the history of mediaeval power is to be sought in its microcosms; these studies look closely at some of the microcosms. ... Read more

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Monasteries were a dominant feature of the landscape of medieval England, but although much critical attention has been devoted to them, comparatively little has been written on the thirty abbeys of the English Premonstratensians (`White Canons'), a gap which this book, the first detailed study since the early 1950s, seeks to fill. Centred upon the remarkable visitation records of Richard Redman (d.1505), commissary-general and visitor of the English Premonstratensian abbeys, it covers topics such as the foundation and development of the English Premonstratensian province; Redman's visitation of the Premonstratensian abbeys; conventual food and clothing; misdemeanours, such as sexual immorality and apostasy; liturgical observances; spirituality and learning; and English Premonstratensian libraries. It thus offers evidence for the vitality of the English Premonstratensians, as well as re-evaluating their monastic observances.JOSEPH GRIBBIN works at the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research. ... Read more

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Through the use of much unpublished material, this book offers a balanced assessment of the realities of life in rural England during the later Middle Ages, based as much on the perspective of the peasants themselves as that of their landlords. The Great Revolt of 1381 provides a dramatic glimpse of peasant grievances and the obvious peasant discontent which was its cause helps to explain many of the changes forced upon landlords during the ensuing 120 years. During the period 1380-1450 most English landlords began to lease their properties and lost interest in rigorously controlling their servile peasantry. As a result serfdom gradually disappeared. Peasant migration ceased to be restricted by landlords and there was an unprecedented amount of settlement redistribution as peasants tried to move to more promising areas. Alongside discussions of population movements, including the controversial subjects of village desertion and the spread of enclosure, much evidence is given of peasant poverty and continuous unrest. Combining a wealth of detail with a strongly argued narrative, this volume offers an account of the nature, development and demise of English serfdom. ... Read more

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Convents were an important part of medieval monastic life, but only now, with the upsurge of interest in women's history, are they beginning to receive the attention they deserve. The prevailing view has been that female monasticism was bankrupt, spiritually and socially as well as financially, but Professor Oliva shows the reality to have been otherwise. In her study of the eleven female monasteries in the diocese of Norwich between 1350-1540, the convents emerge as integral parts of the local social and spiritual landscape, with nuns more active in the local community than their male counterparts, and markedly more popular with parish gentry and yeoman farmers (as their wills prove). The majority of nuns are shown to have been from these parish gentry families, not from the upper gentry or aristocracy as has been thought, and the records of their active lives, so rewardingly examined here, reveal mobility within the nunnery too, the existence of a `career ladder' enabling nuns to progress to more important and prestigious household offices. ... Read more

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By drawing equally on the work of historians and archaeologists, Professor Colin Platt puts forward a view of English medieval society in which there is much that is new and unexpected. ... Read more

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In recent decades, scholars have shown an increasing interest in gossip's social, psychological, and literary functions. The first book-length study of medieval gossip, Transforming Talk shifts the current debate and argues that gossip functions primarily as a transformative discourse, influencing not only social interactions but also literary and religious practices. Known as 'jangling' in Middle English, gossip was believed to corrupt parishioners, disturb the peace, and cause civil and spiritual unrest. But gossip was also a productive cultural force; it reconfigured pastoral practice, catalyzed narrative experimentation, and restructured social and familial relationships. Transforming Talk will appeal to a diverse audience, including scholars interested in late medieval culture, religion, and society; Chaucer; and women in the Middle Ages. ... Read more

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A detailed survey which examines the major developments in English society during this period of social crises, population decline, agarian unrest, the introduction to enclosures - and political tensions particularly over succession. ... Read more

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This book illuminates the world of medieval gentry families through examination of the magnificent brasses and monuments of the Cobham family. Nigel Saul's compelling study provides a window onto the social and religious culture of the middle ages and offers a new paradigm for the study of medieval church monuments. ... Read more