When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they ree...

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough...

*A New York Times Notable Book*An epic adventure ranging from the terror of the Vikings to the golden age of cities: Michael Pye tells the amazing story of how modernity emerged on the shores of the North Sea.Saints and spies, pirat...

In this important new work Ian Mortimer examines some of the most controversial questions in medieval history, including whether Edward II was murdered, his possible later life in Italy, the weakness of the Lancastrian claim to the th...

In AD 476 the Roman Empire fell–or rather, its western half did. Its eastern half, which would come to be known as the Byzantine Empire, would endure and often flourish for another eleven centuries. Though its capital would move to ...

"Lars Brownworth's The Normans is like a gallop through the Middle Ages on a fast warhorse. It is rare to find an author who takes on a subject so broad and so complex, while delivering a book that is both fast-paced and readable...

Brilliant study of art, life and thought in France and the Netherlands during the 14th and 15th centuries explores the period's splendor and simplicity, courtesy and cruelty, its idyllic vision of life, despair and mysticism, religiou...

A major new history of the Crusades with an unprecedented wide scope, told in a tableau of portraits of people on all sides of the wars, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Templars. For more than one thousand years, ...

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: the Norman Conquest.An upstart French duke who sets out to conquer the most powerful and unified kingdom in Christendom. An invasion force on ...

How a cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history—years before the Black DeathIn May 1315, it started to rain. For the seven disastrous years that followed, Europeans would be visited by a ...

The beguines began to form in various parts of Europe over eight hundred years ago. Beguines were laywomen, not nuns, and they did not live in monasteries. They practiced a remarkable way of living independently, and they were never a...