The Sea in the Middle presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration.Key features:Fifteen-chapter structure t...

King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his vic...

Texts from the Middle is a companion primary source reader to the textbook The Sea in the Middle. It can be used alone or in conjunction with the textbook, providing an original history of the Middle Ages that places the Mediterranean at the geographical center of the study of the period from 650 to 1650.Building on the textbook’s unique approach, these sources center on the Mediterranean and emphasize the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and E...

This early work by Thomas Nashe was originally published in 1600 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Summer's Last Will and Testament' is an Elizabethan era stage play that broke new ground in the development of English Renaissance drama. Thomas Nashe was born in November 1567. He was an English Elizabethan Pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist, but little is known with certainty about his life. Much of the information we have has been inferred fro...

Something strange is happening to Thomas Passmore.Waking from a warm Australian beach, he finds himself at Heathrow Airport on a winter’s morning, but can’t remember getting there.Haunted by his father’s suicide, his mother’s rejection and by increasingly vivid dreams of Kate Hainley, his first love, Thomas’s bizarre journey takes him into a world where one man’s struggle to live again is as timeless as the battle of the seasons.Journeying from present-day Australia...