Southern France

A guide to the leisure cycle routes south of the Loire Valley in France. It includes traffic-free routes and signed touring routes with a factfile and a text description of what to see along the way.

The Roman Remains of Southern France is the only specialist guidebook to this region available. It is the result of the most up-to-date research. Comprehensive in coverage, it provides depth and context while evoking the distinctive atmosphere of the place. The book is easy to use, with a large number of maps, site plans and photographs and it will enable the traveller to explore the major cultural contribution made by the Romans to this part of France.

A technological analysis of lithic assemblages from southern France and Northern Italy, this work aims to reconstruct the entire reduction sequence, from the procurement of lithic raw materials to the use and discard of tools.

What was Christianity like for ordinary people between the turn of the millennium and the coming of the Black Death? What changed and what continued, in their experiences, habits, feelings, hopes, and fears? How did they know themselves to be Christians, and indeed to be good Christians? This book answers those questions through a focus on one specific region — southern France — across a particularly fraught period of history, one beset by the changes wrought by the Gregorian reforms, the spectre of heresy, the violence of crusade, the coming of inquisition, and the pastoral revolution associated with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Using an array of different historical documents, John H. Arnold explores the material contexts of Christian worship from the eleventh through to the fourteenth centuries, the shifting episcopal expectations of the ordinary laity, the changes wrought through wider socioeconomic developments, and periods of sharp inflection brought by the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath. Throughout, the book explores the complex spectrum of lay piety, finding enthusiasms and doubts, faith and scepticism, agency and negotiation. It explores not just developments in the content of faith for the laity but the very dynamics of belief as a lived experience. We are shown how across these key centuries Christianity developed in its external practices, but also via inculcating a more interiorized and affective mode of belief; and thus, it is argued, it can be said to have become truly a 'religion' — a structured, demanding, and rewarding faith — for the many and not just the few.

The Roman Remains of Southern France is the only specialist guidebook to this region available. It is the result of the most up-to-date research. Comprehensive in coverage, it provides depth and context while evoking the distinctive atmosphere of the place. The book is easy to use, with a large number of maps, site plans and photographs and it will enable the traveller to explore the major cultural contribution made by the Romans to this part of France.

From Sara Midda, the miniaturist whose first book nine years ago evoked all the pleasures of an English garden and received international acclaim, comes a wondrous sketch book from a year spent in the South of France--and artist's personal journal carried everywhere and crammed with drawings and notions and thoughts both surprising and whimsical.