Administration And Organization Of War In Thirteenth Century England

The essays brought together in this volume examine the conduct of war by the Angevin kings of England during the long thirteenth century (1189-1307). Drawing upon a wide range of unpublished administrative records that have been largely ignored by previous scholarship, David S. Bachrach offers new insights into the military technology of the period, including the types of artillery and missile weapons produced by the royal government. The studies in this volume also highlight the administrative sophistication of the Angevin kings in military affairs, showing how they produced and maintained huge arsenals, mobilized vast quantities of supplies for their armies in the field, and provided for the pastoral care of their men. Bachrach also challenges the knight-centric focus of much of the scholarship on this period, demonstrating that the militarization of the English population penetrated to men in the lower social and economic strata, who volunteered in large numbers for military service, and even made careers as professional soldiers. (CS1088).

Warfare in Medieval Europe, now in its second edition, offers considerably more attention to the transition from the later Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages, the composition of the armies of the opponents of the West, and the experience of commanders and individual combatants on the battlefield. This second revised and expanded edition provides a more in-depth thematic discussion of the nature and conduct of war, with an emphasis on its overall impact on society, from the late Roman Empire to the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The authors explore the origins of the institutions, physical infrastructure, and intellectual underpinnings of warfare, with chapters on military topography, military technology, logistics, combat, and strategy. Bernard and David Bachrach have also added a new chapter, which provides two detailed campaign narratives that highlight the themes treated throughout the text. The geographical scope of the volume encompasses Latin Europe, the Slavic World, Scandinavia, and the eastern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the conflict between Western Christianity and the Islamic Near East. Written in an accessible and engaging way, Warfare in Medieval Europe is the ideal resource for all students of the history of medieval warfare.

Written over several decades and collected together for the first time, these richly detailed contextual studies by a leading historian of science examine the diverse ways in which cultural values and political and professional considerations impinged upon the construction, acceptance and applications of nineteenth century evolutionary theory. They include a number of interrelated analyses of the highly politicised roles of embryos and monsters in pre- and post- Darwinian evolutionary theorizing, including Darwin’s; several studies of the intersection of Darwinian science and its practitioners with issues of gender, race and sexuality, featuring a pioneering contextual analysis of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection; and explorations of responses to Darwinian science by notable Victorian women intellectuals, including the crusading anti-feminist and ardent Darwinian, Eliza Lynn Linton, the feminist and leading anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe, and Annie Besant, the bible-bashing, birth-control advocate who confronted Darwin’s opposition to contraception at the notorious Knowlton Trial.

Papers on aspects of the growth of royal government during the century. The size and jurisdiction of English royal government underwent sustained development in the thirteenth century, an understanding of which is crucial to a balanced view of medieval English society. The papers here follow three central themes: the development of central government, law and justice, and the crown and the localities. Examined within this framework are bureaucracy and enrolment under John and his contemporaries; the Royal Chancery; the adaptation of the Exchequer in response to the rapidly changing demands of the crown; the introduction of a licensing system for mortmain alienations; the administration of local justice; women as sheriffs; and a Nottinghamshire study examining the tensions between the role of the king as manorial lord and as monarch. Contributors: NICK BARRATT, PAUL R. BRAND, DAVID CARPENTER, DAVID CROOK, ANTHONY MUSSON, NICHOLAS C. VINCENT, LOUISE WILKINSON

The eleven articles in this volume examine controversial subjects of central importance to medieval economic historians. Topics include the relative roles played by money and credit in financing the economy, whether credit could compensate for shortages of coin, and whether it could counteract the devastating mortality of the Black Death. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the Statute Merchant and Staple records, the articles chart the chronological and geographical changes in the economy from the late-thirteenth to the early-sixteenth centuries. This period started with the triumph of English merchants over alien exporters in the early 1300s, and concluded in the early 1500s with cloth exports overtaking wool in value. The articles assess how these changes came about, as well as the degree to which both political and economic forces altered the pattern of regional wealth and enterprise in ways which saw the northern towns decline, and London rise to be the undisputed financial as well as the political capital of England.

Metaphysics and Hermeneutics in the Medieval Platonic Tradition consists of twelve essays originally published between 2006 and 2015, dealing with main trends and specific figures within the medieval Platonic tradition. Three essays provide general surveys of the transmission of late ancient thought to the Middle Ages with emphasis on the ancient authors, the themes, and their medieval readers, respectively. The remaining essays deal especially with certain major figures in the Platonic tradition, including pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, and Nicholas of Cusa. The principal conceptual aim of the collection is to establish the primacy of hermeneutics within the philosophical program developed by these authors: in other words, to argue that their philosophical activity, substantially albeit not exclusively, consists of the reading and evaluation of authoritative texts. The essays also argue that the role of hermeneutics varies in the course of the tradition between being a means towards the development of metaphysical theory and being an integral component of metaphysics itself. In addition, such changes in the status and application of hermeneutics to metaphysics are shown to be accompanied by a shift from emphasizing the connection between logic and philosophy to emphasizing that between rhetoric and philosophy. The collection of essays fills in a lacuna in the history of philosophy in general between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. It also initiates a dialogue between the metaphysical hermeneutics of medieval Platonism and certain modern theories of hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction. The book will be of special interest to students of the classical tradition in western thought, and more generally to students of medieval philosophy, theology, history, and literature.

Medieval Greece brings together twelve articles by historian Michael Heslop, showcasing his long-standing interest in the medieval castles of Greece. Ten of the articles in this volume focus on the Dodecanese islands, mainly Rhodes, at the time of their rule by the Hospitallers during the period 1306–1522. Scholarly and popular interest in the military orders has grown substantially over the last twenty years, but comparatively little has been written about the Hospitaller Dodecanese. What distinguishes this work is the author’s use of hitherto unpublished documents from the Hospitaller archives in Malta and his assiduous field work on the island sites discussed. Heslop’s work on the Hospitallers on the island of Rhodes has also enabled him to put together an important gazetteer of place-names in the countryside of Rhodes, published here for the first time. The remaining two chapters of the collection summarize ground-breaking detective work to locate Villehardouin’s ‘lost’ castle of Grand Magne in the Mani, and present a wider study of Byzantine fortifications in medieval Greece. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval history, and to all those interested in the history of the Hospitallers.

Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924–2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English and American Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular surveys of English Literature in Dutch, but – first and foremost – he was a bibliographer and a historian. His scholarly oeuvre is extensive and includes such highlights as English Monarchs and their Books (London 1986), a study of the Old Royal Library. However, many of his publications are hidden in occasional publications, periodicals and introductions to books no longer in print. That is why a – posthumous – selection of his bibliographical essays appeared in 2013, entitled Aspects of Book Culture (Ashgate 2013), and that is why it was decided to bring out a companion volume containing a selection of his essays in the field of recusant history. The present edition contains fourteen of Birrell’s articles published between 1950 and 2006. They all demonstrate his bibliographical expertise, his in-depth knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Catholic history and his absolute determination to examine every scrap of archival material that might shed light on the episodes he was investigating. But, perhaps most important of all, he combined his scholarship with an intense interest in the individual lives that shape and are shaped by history, so the lasting impression that these articles will make is the sense of getting close to a whole series of personalities caught up in the turmoil of their time. Aspects of Recusant History was edited by Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom, all three former students of Tom Birrell and, both individually and collectively, authors and editors of a whole range of important book historical publications. (CS1092).