A magisterial history of the origins, reality, and legend of the knight“A carefully researched, concise, readable, and entertaining account of an institution that remains a part of the Western imagination.” —Los Angeles TimesBorn out of the chaos of the early Middle Ages, the armored and highly mobile knight revolutionized warfare and quickly became a mythic figure in history. From the Knights Templars and English knighthood to the crusades and chivalry, The Knight in Histo...

The definitive classic used as a source for Game of Thrones: "The Gieses succeed in making a remote and unfamiliar world accessible." — Kirkus ReviewsA bestseller by two widely respected historians, Joseph and Frances Gies's Life in a Medieval Castle remains a timeless work of popular medieval scholarship.Focusing on Chepstow, an English castle on the Welsh border that survived the turbulent Middle Ages with a relative lack of viole...

From bestselling historians Frances and Joseph Gies, authors of the classic “Medieval Life” series, comes this compelling, lucid, and highly readable account of the family unit as it evolved throughout the Medieval period—reissued for the first time in decades.“Some particular books that I found useful for Game of Thrones and its sequels deserve mention. Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City, both by Joseph and Fra...

The reissue of Joseph and Frances Gies’s classic bestseller on life in medieval villages.This new reissue of Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural people at work and at play in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the village of Elton, in the English East Midlands, the Gieses detail the agricultural advances that made communal living possible, explain what domestic life was like for serf and lord ...

An ambitious work that traces the stories and fates of women in Medieval Europe over the course of a millennium. "A wealth of solid information." — The New York TimesMedieval history is often written as a series of battles and territorial shifts. But the essential contributions of women during this period have been too often relegated to the dustbin of history. In Women in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies reclaim this lost history, in a liv...

From acclaimed historians Frances and Joseph Gies comes the reissue of their classic book on day-to-day life in medieval cities, which was a source for George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series.Evoking every aspect of city life in the Middle Ages, Life in a Medieval City depicts in detail what it was like to live in a prosperous city of Northwest Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The year is 1250 CE and the city is Troyes, capital of the county of ...

The fascinating story of the fortunes of one medieval family over the course of a century, from bestselling historians Frances and Joseph Gies.The Pastons were members of the English gentry—a tiny group of roughly 1,000 households sandwiched between the ruling nobility and the peasants, and a rough analog for the contemporary “middle class.” Their existence was fairly typical, but for the fact that it was recorded in an extraordinary collection of nearly 1,000 letters which have su...