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This volume celebrates the work and impact of Professor Helen Nicholson by bringing together twenty-two chapters by colleagues, former students and friends which focus on her major research interests: the Military Orders, women in the Middle Ages and the history of the crusades and the Latin East. These chapters develop and continue discussion that owes much to Nicholson’s research contributions, which she has continued since retirement from her chair in Cardiff University in 2022. They are sorted into five parts reflecting a range of themes: everyday life of the Military Orders; women – in their royal, crusading and Military Orders contexts; the Military Orders in England and their members; aspects of warfare in the Latin East and in Europe; and new findings about the history of crusading and the Military Orders that can be derived from the careful study of archives, records and manuscript sources. This book will appeal to researchers and students interested in Medieval History, the crusades, the Military Orders and Women’s History.
Forty papers link the study of the military orders’ cultural life and output with their involvement in political and social conflicts during the medieval and early modern period. Divided into two volumes, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe respectively, the collection brings together the most up-to-date research by experts from fifteen countries on a kaleidoscope of relevant themes and issues, thus offering a broad-ranging and at the same time very detailed study of the subject.
The new religious orders of the 12th and 13th centuries - the military orders and the mendicants - were established as international orders. Yet they were inevitably dependent on regional and local conditions for recruitment and finance, and could not escape involvement in the power structures, whether secular or ecclesiastical, of the areas in which they were based. This book examines the tensions that arose from this, and how they evolved and were manifested. It looks in particular at the orders’ early expansion, and at the special conditions that applied in frontier regions, notably those in Northern and Central Europe which have typically been less well studied.
Despite the enormous literature on the crusades, the Frankish states in the Aegean (set up in the wake of the Fourth Crusade in 1204) have been seriously neglected by modern historians. Yet their history is both compelling in itself - these were the last crusader states to be set up in the eastern Mediterranean and among the last to fall to the Turks - and also valuable for the case study they offer in medieval colonialism. Peter Lock surveys the social, economic, religious and cultural aspects of the region within a broad political framework, and explores the clash of cultures between the Frankish interlopers and their Byzantine subjects. This is a major addition to crusading studies.
As one of the greatest of the military orders that were generated in the Church, the Order of the Hospital of St John was a major landowner and a significant political presence in most European states. It was also a leading player in the settlements established in the Levant in the wake of the crusades. It survives today. In this source-based and up-to-date account of its activities and internal history in the first two centuries of its existence, attention is particularly paid to the lives of the brothers and sisters who made up its membership and were professed religious. Themes in the book relate to the tension that always existed between the Hospital's roles as both a hospitaller and a military order and its performance as an institution that was at the same time a religious order and a great international corporation.
The sixth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers the fourteenth century, a period dominated by plague, other natural disasters and war which brought to an end three centuries of economic growth and cultural expansion in Christian Europe, but one which also saw important developments in government, religious and intellectual life, and new cultural and artistic patterns. Part I sets the scene by discussion of general themes in the theory and practice of government, religion, social and economic history, and culture. Part II deals with the individual histories of the states of western Europe; Part III with that of the Church at the time of the Avignon papacy and the Great Schism; and Part IV with eastern and northern Europe, Byzantium and the early Ottomans, giving particular attention to the social and economic relations with westerners and those of other civilisations in the Mediterranean.