Fascinating. -- The Wall Street Journal

An enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset. -- Publishers Weekly

The authors of The Bright Ages return with a real-life Game of Thrones (New York Times Book Review)--the story of the Carolingian Civil War, a bloody, protracted battle pitting brother against brother, father against son, that would end an empire, upend a continent, and redefine the future of Europe

By the early ninth century, the Carolingian empire was at the height of its power. The Franks, led by Charlemagne, had built the largest European domain since Rome in its heyday. Though they jockeyed for power, prestige, and profit, the Frankish elites enjoyed political and cultural consensus. But just two generations later, their world was in shambles. Civil war, once an unthinkable threat, had erupted after Louis the Pious's sons tried to overthrow him--and then placed their knives at the other's neck. Families who had once charged into battle together now drew each other's blood.

The Carolingian Civil War would rage for years as kings fought kings, brother faced off against brother, and sons challenged fathers. Oathbreakers is the dramatic history of this brutal, turbulent time. Medieval historians David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele illuminate what happens when a once unshakeable political and cultural order breaks down and long suppressed tensions flare into deadly violence. Drawn from rich primary sources, featuring a wide cast of characters, packed with dramatic twists and turns, this is history that rivals the greatest fictional epics--with consequences that continue to shape our own world.

Oathbreakers offers lessons of what deep cracks in a once-stable social and political fabric might reveal, and the bloody consequences of disagreeing on facts and reality. The Civil War at the heart of this tale asks: who is in and who is out? And what happens when things fall apart?

A history of medieval women's lives as told through the prism of four exceptional individuals. . . . throughout, the tensions of medieval womanhood strain and stretch--eroticism and purity, sexuality and motherhood, silence and speech.--The New York Times

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers--Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife--who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.

Reading the words of these four writers, Hetta Howes engagingly reveals how everyday women lived, survived, and thrived in medieval times. Who did they marry and why? Did they ever have extramarital affairs? Could they earn money and become self-sufficient? Could they be leaders? What did they think about death--and what about life and their place in it? Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife paints a vibrant portrait of these women, their world, and the ways they speak to us today.

Discover the real history behind The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, the PBS Great Performance series of Shakespeare's plays, starring Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sofie Okenedo and Hugh Bonneville.

The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. In this riveting follow-up to The Plantagenets, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest-reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors.

Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in these turbulent times, from Joan of Arc and Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt marked the high point of the medieval monarchy, to Richard III, who murdered his own nephews in a desperate bid to secure his stolen crown. This was a period when headstrong queens and consorts seized power and bent men to their will. With vivid descriptions of the battles of Towton and Bosworth, where the last Plantagenet king was slain, this dramatic narrative history revels in bedlam and intrigue. It also offers a long-overdue corrective to Tudor propaganda, dismantling their self-serving account of what they called the Wars of the Roses.

If you're a fan of Game of Thrones or The Tudors then Dan Jones' swashbucklingly entertaining slice of medieval history will be right up your alley... Every bit as entertaining and readable as his previous blockbuster The Plantagenets. - Daily Express

A lively history . . . [Jones] has managed to touch every major topic. As each piece of the puzzle is placed into position, the modern world gradually comes into view . . . Powers and Thrones provides the reader with a framework for understanding a complicated subject, and it tells the story of an essential era of world history with skill and style.--The New York Times

The New York Times bestselling author returns with an epic history of the medieval world--a rich and complicated reappraisal of an era whose legacy and lessons we are still living with today.

When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era--and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation. In a gripping narrative bursting with big names--from St Augustine and Attila the Hun to the Prophet Muhammad and Eleanor of Aquitaine--Dan Jones charges through the history of the Middle Ages. Powers and Thrones takes readers on a journey through an emerging Europe, the great capitals of late Antiquity, as well as the influential cities of the Islamic West, and culminates in the first European voyages to the Americas.

The medieval world was forged by the big forces that still occupy us today: climate change, pandemic disease, mass migration, and technological revolutions. This was the time when the great European nationalities were formed; when the basic Western systems of law and governance were codified; when the Christian Churches matured as both powerful institutions and the regulators of Western public morality; and when art, architecture, philosophical inquiry and scientific invention went through periods of massive, revolutionary change.

The West was rebuilt on the ruins of an empire and emerged from a state of crisis and collapse to dominate the world. Every sphere of human life and activity was transformed in the thousand years covered by Powers and Thrones. As we face a critical turning point in our own millennium, Dan Jones shows that how we got here matters more than ever.

For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the fall of the holy city was either an inspiring legend or the greatest of horrors. In Crusaders, Dan Jones interrogates the many sides of the larger story, charting a deeply human and avowedly pluralist path through the crusading era.

Expanding the usual timeframe, Jones looks to the roots of Christian-Muslim relations in the eighth century and tracks the influence of crusading to present day. He widens the geographical focus to far-flung regions home to so-called enemies of the Church, including Spain, North Africa, southern France, and the Baltic states. By telling intimate stories of individual journeys, Jones illuminates these centuries of war not only from the perspective of popes and kings, but from Arab-Sicilian poets, Byzantine princesses, Sunni scholars, Shi'ite viziers, Mamluk slave soldiers, Mongol chieftains, and barefoot friars.

Crusading remains a rallying call to this day, but its role in the popular imagination ignores the cooperation and complicated coexistence that were just as much a feature of the period as warfare. The age-old relationships between faith, conquest, wealth, power, and trade meant that crusading was not only about fighting for the glory of God, but also, among other earthly reasons, about gold. In this richly dramatic narrative that gives voice to sources usually pushed to the margins, Dan Jones has written an authoritative survey of the holy wars with global scope and human focus.

The first Plantagenet kings inherited a blood-soaked realm from the Normans and transformed it into an empire that stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem. In this epic narrative history of courage, treachery, ambition, and deception, Dan Jones resurrects the unruly royal dynasty that preceded the Tudors. They produced England's best and worst kings: Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice a queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; their son Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and his conniving brother King John, who was forced to grant his people new rights under the Magna Carta, the basis for our own bill of rights. Combining the latest academic research with a gift for storytelling, Jones vividly recreates the great battles of Bannockburn, Crécy, and Sluys and reveals how the maligned kings Edward II and Richard II met their downfalls. This is the era of chivalry and the Black Death, the Knights Templar, the founding of parliament, and the Hundred Years' War, when England's national identity was forged by the sword.

Rich and lively.--New York Times Book Review

A vibrant look at an unsettled and strangely familiar time that overturns our assumptions about the history of magic.

Imagine: it's the year 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing a trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do?

In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of service magic. Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ranks, practical magic was a cherished resource for navigating life's many challenges.

In historian Tabitha Stanmore's beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I's astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.

Charming in every sense, Cunning Folk is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone era and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.

A GUIDE TO LIVING IN DARK TIMES, FROM PEOPLE WHO REALLY DID

Bursting with wisdom and artwork from the Middle Ages, this handy guide will give you time-tested solutions for all of life's biggest problems. Whether it's choosing an appropriate dog name like Garlik or Filthe, becoming an irresistible suitor even though you can't joust, surviving encounters with rabbits and dragons, or coming to terms with your inevitable demise, this book is full of illuminating advice that is sure to brighten up the darkest of times.

Full of quizzes, how-to-guides, diagrams, and flow charts that take you from birth to your gruesome death, this is the ultimate laugh-out-loud read for history buffs.

Thrilling history provides a new perspective on the Viking-Anglo Saxon conflicts and brings the bloody period vividly to life, perfect for fans of Dan Jones

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for.

Tore Skeie (Norway's Most Important Young Historian) takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.

Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder.

This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire...

The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come....The Bright Ages is a rare thing--a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading.--Slate

Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating. --The Boston Globe

A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality--a brilliant reflection of humanity itself.

The word medieval conjures images of the Dark Ages--centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors.

The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante--inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy--writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today.

The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world lit only by fire but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics.

The Bright Ages contains an 8-page color insert.

This book takes the reader on an immersive journey through medieval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a medieval narrator--including a parchment maker, scribe, and illuminator--introducing various aspects of manuscript production. Sara J. Charles poses the question What actually is a scriptorium? and explores the development of the medieval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press.

With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labor, planning, and networks needed to produce each manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, The Medieval Scriptorium helps us to experience medieval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward and unchanging time characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. By contrast we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world.

We couldn't be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating book, people's horizons - their knowledge, experience and understanding of the world - expanded dramatically. Life was utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, marking the transition from a warrior-led society to that of Shakespeare.

Just as The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England revealed what it was like to live in the fourteenth century, Medieval Horizons provides the perfect primer to the era as a whole. It outlines the enormous cultural changes that took place - from literacy to living standards, inequality and even the developing sense of self - thereby correcting misconceptions and presenting the period as a revolutionary age of fundamental importance in the development of the Western world.

Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and scholars sought to harness supernatural power. They tried to summon spirits, predict the future, and even prolong life. Alongside science and religion, magic lay at the very heart of culture.

In this beautifully illustrated account, Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores the medieval fascination with magic through twenty extraordinary illuminated manuscripts. These books were highly sought after, commissioned by kings and stored in great libraries. They include an astronomical compendium made for Charlemagne's son; The Sworn Book of Honorius, used by a secret society of trained magicians; and the highly influential Picatrix. This vivid new history shows how attitudes to magic and science changed over the medieval period--and produced great works of art as they did so.

Since its first appearance in 2004, The Crusades: A Reader has been the go-to sourcebook in the field. S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt cover the entire crusading movement, from its origins to its modern afterlife, using key primary source documents.

The third edition features a new introduction that includes a guide for students on how to use the book. The editors have also added more content on women, material culture, Jewish and Byzantine perspectives, Muslim-Crusader interactions, and modern use of Crusade imagery and rhetoric by the Far Right. The geographic range is broad, covering not only Crusades in the Middle East, but also in Spain and in northern Europe and against European heretics.

While scholarship, courses, and textbooks on the Crusades have proliferated over the past twenty years, The Crusades: A Reader remains the only comprehensive, up-to-date, and in-print sourcebook available on the subject.

*Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal

The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight--in all his valor and furious follies, a terrible worm in an iron cocoon.

Praise for A Distant Mirror

Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.--The New York Review of Books

A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.--The Wall Street Journal

Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.--Commentary

Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us. -- Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history--even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern.

The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. But statistics can't convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence.

In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people--one third of the known population--before it vanished.

Full coverage is given to all aspects of life in a thousand-year period which saw the creation of western civilization: from the empires and kingdoms of Charlemagne, the Byzantines, and the Hundred Years War, to the ideals of the crusades, the building of great cathedrals and the social catastrophe of the Black Death; the cultural worlds of chivalric knights, popular festivals, and new art forms. The chapters show the movement of the centre of gravity in European life from the Mediterranean to the north; and the authors explore the contrast between Byzantine and Renaissance cultures in the south and the new, complex political and social structures of north-west Europe, which by 1300 had the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen.

In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon. Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably--we've done it before!

From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today's challenges--finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality--threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.

I send you this little book written down in my name, that you may read it for your education, as a kind of mirror.

So wrote the Frankish noblewoman Dhuoda to her young son William in the middle of the ninth century. Intended as a guide to right conduct, the book was to be shared in time with William's younger brother. Dhuoda's situation was poignant. Her husband, Bernard, the count of Septimania, was away and she was separated from her children. William was by Charles the Bald as a guarantee of his father's loyalty, and the younger son's whereabouts were unknown. As war raged in the crumbling Carolingian Empire, the grieving mother, fearing for the spiritual and physical welfare of her absent sons, began in 841 to write her loving counsel in a handbook. Two years later she sent it to William.

Handbook for William memorably expresses Dhuoda's maternal feelings, religious fervor, and learning. In teaching her children how they might flourish in God's eyes, as well as humanity's, Dhuoda reveals the authority of Carolingian women in aristocratic households. She dwells on family relations, social order, the connection between religious and military responsibility, and, always, the central place of Christian devotion in a noble life.

One of the few surviving texts written by a woman in the Middle Ages, Dhuoda's Liber manualis was available in only two faulty Latin manuscripts until a third, superior one was discovered in the 1950s. This English translation is based on the 1975 critical edition and French translation by Pierre Rich . Now available for the first time in paperback, it includes an afterword written by Carol Neel that takes into account recent scholarship and the 1991 revised edition of Rich 's text.

An Economist and Sunday Times Best Book of the Year

Deserves to be hailed as a magnum opus.
--Tom Holland, The Telegraph

Ambitious...seeks to rehabilitate the Holy Roman Empire's reputation by re-examining its place within the larger sweep of European history...Succeeds splendidly in rescuing the empire from its critics.
--Wall Street Journal

Massive, ancient, and powerful, the Holy Roman Empire formed the heart of Europe from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later. An engine for inventions and ideas, with no fixed capital and no common language or culture, it derived its legitimacy from the ideal of a unified Christian civilization--though this did not prevent emperors from clashing with the pope for supremacy.

In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the Holy Roman Empire worked, why it was so important, and how it changed over the course of its existence. The result is a tour de force that raises countless questions about the nature of political and military power and the legacy of its offspring, from Nazi Germany to the European Union.

Engrossing...Wilson is to be congratulated on writing the only English-language work that deals with the empire from start to finish...A book that is relevant to our own times.
--Brendan Simms, The Times

The culmination of a lifetime of research and thought...an astonishing scholarly achievement.
--The Spectator

Remarkable...Wilson has set himself a staggering task, but it is one at which he succeeds heroically.
--Times Literary Supplement