Collected Studies CS1064This collection of Giles Constable's key articles on medieval monastic and ecclesiastical history provides nothing less than a comprehensive overview of research in the field. The book provides an insight into monastic life in the Middle Ages - from Germany to Normandy and from England to Sicily.

Collected Studies CS1065We assume that we have a clear understanding of how people in the Middle Ages thought and which attitudes they struck but in reality this is a subject of enormous complexity of which conclusions can only be drawn via painstaking archival research and decades of study. Giles Constable has spent a career analysing these forces and impulses and this new collection draws together his major findings on a host of topics including frontiers, metaphors, religious li...

The abbey of Bec was founded in the eleventh century and was one of the best-known and most influential monasteries in Normandy. Celebrated for its high standard of religious life and its intellectual activity, Bec also had an exceptional degree of institutional independence.The three treatises collected and translated in this volume - Tractatus de professionibus monachorum ('The Profession of Monks'), De professionibus abbatum ('The Profession of Abbots'), and

The articles in this volume deal with the history of the abbey of Cluny, both its relations with the outside world and its internal organisation and spirituality, from its foundation in 910 until the end of the twelfth century. After an opening article on the early history of Cluny, relating it to previous monasticism and the monastic world of the tenth century, there are a group of articles on how monks were admitted to Cluny, how they were organised, what they did, and on the monastery’s...

Crusading in the twelfth century was less a series of discrete events than a manifestation of an endemic phenomenon that touched almost every aspect of life at that time. The defense of Christendom and the recovery of the Holy Land were widely-shared objectives. Thousands of men, and not a few women, participated in the crusades, including not only those who took the cross but many others who shared the costs and losses, as well as the triumphs of the crusaders. This volume contains not a ...

Medieval Monasticism is a bibliography meant as a guide to medieval monasticism, giving direction to the most important works in the subject and is prepared by an expert in the field, Dr. Constable. The bibliography has three aims: it meant to aid students who are relatively new to the area of study, to guide more advanced readers in a subject where they have had little formal training, and to assist new libraries in forming a basic collection in the subject presented.

En Florencia, en el verano del año 1501, un hombre llamado Antonio Rinaldeschi fue arrestado bajo la acusación de haber arrojado estiércol de caballo contra una imagen de la Madonna que se encontraba expuesta en una hornacina en la parte externa de una iglesia. Enjuiciado sumariamente en pocas horas, fue condenado a morir ahorcado. La pena fue extremadamente severa: ninguno de los crímenes por los cuales fue acusado -sacrilegio, blasfemia e intento de suicidio- se solían castigar con la pe...

In this masterly new work, acclaimed historian Giles MacDonogh explores the moment when Hitler gambled everything. Until 1938, Hitler could be dismissed as a ruthless but efficient dictator, a problem to Germany alone; after 1938 he was clearly a threat to the entire world.In that year The Third Reich came of age and the Führer showed his hand - bringing Germany into line with Nazi ideology and revealing long-held plans to take back those parts of Europe lost to 'Greater Germany' a...

This book surveys the full panorama of ten centuries of Christian monastic life. It moves from the deserts of Egypt and the Frankish monasteries of early medieval Europe to the religious ruptures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the reforms of the later Middle Ages. Throughout that story the book balances a rich sense of detail with a broader synthetic view. It presents the history of religious life and its orders as a complex braid woven from multiple strands: individual and comm...