The invasion of Scotland, 934
The various conflicts and settlements in the period 920 to 945 are often considered inisolation but they are connected and also together form part of two longer-term processes
Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: The Writings of the Middle English Mystics
This dissertation “Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: The Writings of the Middle English Mystics,” seeks to explore the connections between desire and pain in the writings of Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Walter Hilton. All four writers develop a rhetoric that allows them to use pain and/or desire as a catalyst through which their writing becomes embodied.
Adventures far from home: Hanseatic trade with the Faroe Islands
he voyage to Iceland, now a major destina- tion, took about four weeks (gardiner & mehler 2007, 403; Krause 2010, 150). The Faroe Islands are situated more or less in the middle of that distance and provided a fine stop-over. The islands were an additional market for their trade business and in case of storms offered a safe and most welcome shelter.
Conversion and Empire: Byzantine Missionaries, Foreign Rulers, and Christian Narratives (ca. 300-900)
For a broader modern audience today, if taken somewhat journalistically, Pusicius’ story is an example that cuts along cultural and religious lines that presumably originate in ancient, political divisions and confirm a “clash of civilizations” thesis.
Ibn Hazm on homosexuality
The most commonly used term for homosexual contacts between men in Arabic is fil (or amal) qawm Lût (“the act of the people of Lot”), from which is derived the substantive liwàt. The man who indulges in such acts is called lufl.
The Troublesome bequest of Dame Joan: the establishment of the chapel of St Anne at Walsingham Priory
In an act of both piety and remembrance, his widow, Dame Joan, ordered that his body should be buried within the great Priory church at nearby Walsingham and, above the tomb, there should be a chapel created in dedication to the mother of the Blessed Virgin, Saint Anne.
The Indigenous Christians of the Arabic Middle East in an Age of Crusaders, Mongols, and Mamlūks (1244-1366)
The chronological period of study is highlighted by the usurpation of the Ayyūbid-ruled Sultanate by the Baḥrī Mamlūks, while the two most important political-military events in the region were the collapse of the Crusader States and the invasion of the Mongols. This thesis will examine how events impacted on the nine Christian Confessions, treating each separately.
Love and Saint Francis of Assisi: A Performer in the Middle Ages
In “spending most of his life out of doors, in all seasons” Francis defies the basis of what we call civilized existence; if history is about progress in terms of making human life secure from nature’s vagaries, Francis rejects such a conception of history, along with its false sense of security, in order to situate human life in and as the natural world.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Approach to History
How do an historian’s sources affect his history writing?
Technological Development in Late Saxon Textile Production: its relationship to an emerging market economy and changes in society
The process of change from domestic textile production in early Anglo-Saxon England (5th – mid-7th century) to the more commercially based, organised industry of the late Saxon period (late 9th – 11th century) is a long and complex one.
The Meaning of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the Tenth Century
The Great Mosque of Cordoba is universally recognized as one of the most singular monuments of medieval architecture. Celebrated for its harmony, balance, dramatic use of light and decoration, and its overall unity and aesthetic sensitivity, the monument belongs to an established functional type, the hypostyle mosque, but amounts to more than a mere variant of this type.
Perkin Warbeck: Whether my hero was or was not an impostor, he was believed to be the true man by his contemporaries
So what about the famous confession? By historians in the Tudor tradition this is usually seen as absolute proof that he was an impostor, arguing that “there is nothing in [his] confession which should make us doubt his truthfulness”. Somehow they cannot have looked at it too closely.
The Curious Career and Uncertain Past of Perkin Warbeck
Was Warbeck just another in a long line of pretenders to the throne of England, or did his appearance in Ireland in 1491 prove the innocence
of Richard III, whom most historians accuse of murdering his nephews, the Princes in the Tower?
The Edwardian Conquest and its Military Consolidation
On land, English armies faced a highly mobile, because lightly armed, infantry whose favoured tactics were ambushes and guerrilla strikes although some native retinues did boast heavy cavalry and siege engines; surprise and speed had to be matched by vigilance and the capacity to concentrate troops swiftly at the point of need.
John Scotus Eriugena
Eriugena, master of the liberal arts, translator, philologue, poet, philosopher, and theologian, ‘reinvented the greater part of the theses of Neoplatonism’, by his time largely forgotten in the Latin West.
Avorio d’ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era
Why, after a scarcity of elephant ivory in northern Europe during the twelfth century, was there sudden access to such large tusks around 1240?
Where does Old Norse religion end?
How did the believers of the Old Norse religion perceive other religions, and to what extent did people from the outside get in contact with myths and rituals?
Labyrinth
A review of Part 1 of author Kate Mosse’s, “Labyrinth”. Cathars, Crusaders and the Holy Grail!
A Tale of two cities and the Abbasid Caliphate 132- 656 / 750 – 1258
Examining the role of Baghdad in the development of the Abbasid Caliphate.