Fiefs and Vassals

Fiefs and Vassals PDF Author: Susan Reynolds
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0198206488
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 557

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Book Description
Fiefs and Vassals has changed our view of the medieval world. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism. Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval scholarsfrom the works of medieval academic lawyers and tha they provide a bad guide to the realities of medieval society.This is a radical new examination of relations between rulers, nobles, and free men, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It has revolutionized the way we think of the Middle Ages.

Mediaeval Feudalism

Mediaeval Feudalism PDF Author: Carl Stephenson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801490132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Gives a clear and concise account of the feudal system, from its origin and growth to its decay. Also covers the principles of feudal tenure, chivalry, the military life of the nobility, and the workings of the feudal government.

An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns

An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns PDF Author: Susan Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Surveying English urban life from the fifth to the early sixteenth centuries, this book traces the stages by which towns attained their varying measures of independence. The internal disputes they suffered and the degree to which they declined in the later Middle Ages are also studied.

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 PDF Author: Susan Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781383032154
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Reynolds focuses on the collective values and activities of lay society over several centuries, offering a new approach to the history of medieval Europe. This edition incorporates a new introduction which amplifies the arguments of recent research.

Law, laity and solidarities

Law, laity and solidarities PDF Author: Pauline Stafford
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526148285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.

Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe

Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe PDF Author: Stephen D. White
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000939383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This is the second collection of studies by Stephen D. White to be published by Variorum (the first being Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France). The essays in this volume look principally at France and England from Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon times up to the 12th century. They analyze Latin and Old French discourses that medieval nobles used to construct their relationships with kin, lords, men, and friends, and investigate the political dimensions of such relationships with particular reference to patronage/clientage, the use of land as an item of exchange, and feuding. In so doing, the essays call into question the conventional practice of studying kinship and feudalism as independent systems of legal institutions and propose new strategies for studying them.

Why Europe?

Why Europe? PDF Author: Michael Mitterauer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226532380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Why did capitalism and colonialism arise in Europe and not elsewhere? Why were parliamentarian and democratic forms of government founded there? What factors led to Europe’s unique position in shaping the world? Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Why Europe? tackles these classic questions with illuminating results. Michael Mitterauer traces the roots of Europe’s singularity to the medieval era, specifically to developments in agriculture. While most historians have located the beginning of Europe’s special path in the rise of state power in the modern era, Mitterauer establishes its origins in rye and oats. These new crops played a decisive role in remaking the European family, he contends, spurring the rise of individualism and softening the constraints of patriarchy. Mitterauer reaches these conclusions by comparing Europe with other cultures, especially China and the Islamic world, while surveying the most important characteristics of European society as they took shape from the decline of the Roman empire to the invention of the printing press. Along the way, Why Europe? offers up a dazzling series of novel hypotheses to explain the unique evolution of European culture.

Reframing the Feudal Revolution

Reframing the Feudal Revolution PDF Author: Charles West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107028868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book revisits the idea of a 'Feudal Revolution' in Europe between 800 and 1100, examining the causes of profound socio-economic change.

Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

Aristocratic Women in Medieval France PDF Author: Theodore Evergates
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Were aristocratic women in medieval France little more than appendages to patrilineal families, valued as objects of exchange and necessary only for the production of male heirs? Such was the view proposed by the great French historian Georges Duby more than three decades ago and still widely accepted. In Aristocratic Women in Medieval France another model is put forth: women of the landholding elite—from countesses down to the wives of ordinary knights—had considerable rights, and exercised surprising power. The authors of the volume offer five case studies of women from the mid-eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, and from regions as diverse as Blois-Chartres, Champagne, Flanders, and Occitania. They show not only the diversity of life experiences these women enjoyed but the range of social and political roles open to them. The ecclesiastical and secular sources they mine confirm that women were regarded as full members of both their natal and affinal families, were never excluded from inheriting and controlling property, and did not have their share of family property limited to dowries. Women across France exchanged oaths for fiefs and assumed responsibilities for enfeoffed knights. As feudal lords, they settled disputes involving vassals, fortified castles, and even led troops into battle. Aristocratic Women in Medieval France clearly shows that it is no longer possible to depict well-born women as powerless in medieval society. Demonstrating the importance of aristocratic women in a period during which they have been too long assumed to have lacked influence, it forces us to reframe our understanding of the high Middle Ages.

A Source Book for Mediæval History

A Source Book for Mediæval History PDF Author: Oliver J. Thatcher
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
A Source Book for Mediæval History is a scholarly piece by Oliver J. Thatcher. It covers all major historical events and leaders from the Germania of Tacitus in the 1st century to the decrees of the Hanseatic League in the 13th century.