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Reexamines five famed medieval kings, questioning whether their celebrated legacies truly reflect their complex and often troubling reigns. Henry II. Richard I. Edward I. Edward III. Henry V. Five men seen as success stories of Medieval English kingship. Three inherited tarnished crowns and restored their glory. Legal reformers and warriors, they ruled over widespread lands for decades, upholding justice, expanding their authority and changing their realms. Two others are the most famous of warrior kings, their short reigns encompassing crusades and legendary victories. Contemporary writers often waxed lyrical about them as ideals of kingship. Many modern writers have been similarly enthusia...
"Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians such as Hume, Gibbon and Stubbs criticized Richard for his neglect of domestic government and policy, and cast him as a careless ruler and bad husband."--BOOK JACKET. "Harnessing the latest sources and interpretations, John Gillingham provides a new assessment of Richard I, looking at what matters in history as well as what matters in legend."--BOOK JACKET.
This book examines the development of a European environmental conscience through successive steps of European integration in energy policy. In the 1960s-70s, the world was slowly beginning to realise that environment degradation was not sustainable. With phenomena such as acid rain, it became clear that pollution did not stop at national boundaries and the European environmental conscience developed in parallel to such growing environmental concerns. The oil crisis in 1973 was a turning point in the integration process for both energy policy and environment policy, and while further integration towards the European energy policy failed; the environmental policies took shape in measures such as energy saving. The Commission incorporated both energy and environmental policies into the EU policy canon and built an institutional framework, responding to the insufficiency of national policy answers and the developing environmental conscience of the European people. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Integration, European Union politics and history and environmental politics and policy.
In a time when men fought and women stayed home, Nicholaa de la Haye held Lincoln Castle against all-comers. Not once, but three times, earning herself the ironic praise that she acted 'manfully'. Nicholaa gained prominence in the First Baron's War, the civil war that followed the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215. Although recently widowed, and in her 60s, in 1217 Nicholaa endured a siege that lasted over three months, resisting the English rebel barons and their French allies. The siege ended in the battle known as the Lincoln Fair, when 70-year-old William Marshal, the Greatest Knight in Christendom, spurred on by the chivalrous need to rescue a lady in distress, came to Nicholaa's aid. Nicholaa de la Haye was a staunch supporter of King John, remaining loyal to the very end, even after most of his knights and barons had deserted him. A truly remarkable lady, Nicholaa was the first woman to be appointed sheriff in her own right. Her strength and tenacity saved England at one of the lowest points in its history. Nicholaa de la Haye is one woman in English history whose story needs to be told...
The world of medieval chivalry is at once glamorous and violent, alluring yet alien. Our popular views of the period are largely inherited from the nineteenth-century romantics, for whom chivalry evoked images of knights in shining armour, competing for the attention of fair ladies - with pennons and streamers fluttering from castle battlements. But what is the reality? Were the rituals and romance of chivalry designed to provide an escape from the brutal facts of almost continuous warfare? Or did they instead help regulate the conduct of war and moderate its violent excesses? Nigel Saul charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion and architecture. He shows us a world of kings and barons, castles and cathedrals - a world shaped by Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, by Magna Carta and the rule of law, by battles like Bannockburn and Crecy, by the Black Death and by tournaments, round tables and the cult of Arthurianism.