English Medieval History

FIRST PRIZE: Firebird Awards - Best Time Travel Novel - 2024 FIRST PRIZE: Reader’s Choice: Best SciFi Time Travel Trilogy - 2023 Torn between factions in King Arthur's Court where he must choose between factions of the King, Sir Lanslod and/or the usurper Mordred, an accidental time traveler materializes as the only Jewish knight at the Oval Table, whose few friends are Mirgan the Witch and two stoner Venusians, and must decide whether to return the stolen Holy Grail to avoid being burned at the stake or risk being stranded where the food is even worse than modern day England. READER ...

The Middle Ages remains one of the most defining eras of human civilization. It is an era characterized by illustrious monarchs, valiant knights in shining armor, and magnificent Gothic architecture. It is also an era characterized by fervent friction, brutish barbarism, frequent famines, pestilent plagues, and of course, death. Some say the mortality rate in medieval times was like no other; with about a third of all children dying before the age of five, it was nearly miraculous for one to live past their 40s.

In this ground-breaking work, Norman Cantor explains how our current notion of the Middle Ages—with its vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies—was born in the 20th century. The medieval world was not simply excavated through systematic research. It had to be conceptually created: it had to be invented, and this is the story of that invention.

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

Author Stewart Gordon has fashioned a fascinating and unique look at Asia from AD 700 to 1500, a time when Asia was the world, by describing the personal journeys of Asia's many travelers - the merchants who traded spices along the Silk Road, the apothecaries who exchanged medicine and knowledge from China to the Middle East, and the philosophers and holy men who crossed continents to explore and exchange ideas, books, science, and culture.

With LETTERS OF FIRE AND SWORD, Dorothy Wiley has merged Scotland’s gut-wrenching history with extraordinary fiction.In the year of our Lord, 1306, patriots of Scotland, support Robert the Bruce’s fight to free both their conquered country and his family, imprisoned by the English king. Powerful knights like Highlander Sir Alexander MacMillan join the struggle fighting battle after battle for eight long years. All the while, Alexander’s first love, Lady Erca MacNeill, is imprisoned alongside the woman who dared to crown Bruce king of Scotland, Countess Isabella MacDuff. The brutal ...

For three years, the Cloaked Bandit has terrorized Wessex, robbing the nobility by knifepoint and a well-placed arrow. But little does anyone know, this bandit is in fact Juliana Wessex, the rightful ruler of the land, and a girl her tyrannical uncle - the current Lord Wessex - believes was killed along with father.

Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland's Atlantic shore. These "white martyrs" sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the world where they could fast, pray, and move closer to an understanding of God: places where they could see angels. Columba, who founded the famous monastery at Iona, was the most well-known of these courageous men who rowed their curraghs towards danger and uncertainty in a pagan land, but the many others are now largely forgotten by history.

The Knights Templar were the wealthiest, most powerful - and most secretive - of the military orders that flourished in the crusading era. Their story - encompassing as it does the greatest international conflict of the Middle Ages, a network of international finance, a swift rise in wealth and influence followed by a bloody and humiliating fall - has left a comet's tail of mystery that continues to fascinate and inspire historians, novelists and conspiracy theorists. Unabridged edition read by Dan Jones.

At the dawn of the thirteenth century, Constantinople stood as the bastion of Christianity in Eastern Europe. The capital city of the Byzantine Empire, it was a center of art, culture, and commerce that had commanded trading routes between Asia, Russia, and Europe for hundreds of years. But in 1204, the city suffered a devastating attack that would spell the end of the Holy Roman Empire. Historian Ernle Bradford brings to life this powerful tale of envy and greed, demonstrating the far-reaching consequences this siege would have across Europe for centuries to come.

The story of Troy speaks to all of us - the kidnapping of Helen, a queen celebrated for her beauty, sees the Greeks launch a thousand ships against the city of Troy, to which they will lay siege for 10 whole and very bloody years. It is Zeus, the king of the gods, who triggers the war when he asks the Trojan prince Paris to judge the fairest goddess of them all. Aphrodite bribes Paris with the heart of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of the Greeks, and naturally, nature takes its course.

The crucial importance of education in China, a prized virtue instilled in the population among all classes by beloved teacher and philosopher Confucius in the 6th century BCE, generated an unprecedented and long-lived golden age of literature and art. It also gave rise to a cornucopia of transformative innovations and groundbreaking technology, particularly following the dawn of the Common Era.

Listen to the stories, histories, and legends of medieval knights and the groups to which they belonged. Some are more well known than others, although all of them played a role in history.

Starting AD 400 (around the time of their invasion of England) and running through to the 1100s (the 'Aftermath'), historian Geoffrey Hindley shows the Anglo-Saxons as formative in the history not only of England but also of Europe. The society inspired by the warrior world of the Old English poem Beowulf saw England become the world's first nation state and Europe's first country to conduct affairs in its own language, and Bede and Boniface of Wessex establish the dating convention we still use today.

Mention "Medieval knights" and people may think of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. But these warriors weren't just heroes from fables and legend. They were real men who strapped themselves into heavy armor and bravely charged into battle. Learn what life was like as an elite armored-warrior in Medieval Europe.

Medieval feudalism is one of those subjects which most of us are familiar with, and yet have difficulty describing. Was is a political, military, economic, or social system? And how did it develop? All these questions are answered in this superb book. Carl Stephenson has done a magnificent job of paring away all extraneous subjects and focusing on just the key elements. This short book, a masterpiece of brevity, succinctly sums up medieval feudalism better than anything ever written.

The tale of William the Conqueror is written down by numerous contemporaries with various perspectives. It's a tale that would inspire some, while fascinate and even terrify others. It’s a tale of a man from a seemingly small land rising to rule one of the most powerful, stable kingdoms in all of Europe at the time - a kingdom that would sow the seeds of an empire that would sprout many centuries later.

Just as out from the flames come the Phoenix, from the ashes of an identity, devastated, came Margaret of Austria, the most influential female of her time. Married into the highest echelons of European monarchy, queen of France, princess of Spain, and duchess of savoy, the security of destiny proved false, leaving the young Margaret married thrice and widowed twice. And yet, this unplanned destiny was transformative, forming her into the hand that moved the puzzle pieces of European diplomacy. Married at two years of age to the dauphin of France, by twelve, Margaret of Austria found herself...

The Hellenica is Xenophon’s continuation of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, literally resuming from where the previous author’s history was abruptly left unfinished and narrating the events of the final seven years of the conflict and the war’s aftermath. Some historians consider the Hellenica to be a personal work, written by Xenophon in retirement on his Spartan estate, and intended primarily for circulation among his friends, who would have known the main protagonists and events, having most likely participated in them.

Over 400 years before Columbus "discovered" the New World, it is believed that someone else already had - Icelander Bjarni Herjolfsson. Over the years 985-986, Herjolfsson was attempting to reach Eirik the Red's colony on Greenland when he was blown off-course. He sighted a coastline covered with woods, and thus was the first to glimpse a piece of North America.