Medieval European history is a vast and ever-growing field, so coming up with a top ten book-list is no small task. To make the job manageable, what follows is a “top ten” of quite a
Charles West
Just a few miles outside of Maastricht is a large Dutch village called Meerssen. Today it's a sleepy commuter settlement. But on this day in 870, it witnessed the tense conclusion to negotiations between two
“In the Dark Ages”, wrote Henry Thomas Buckle in 1857, “men were credulous and ignorant”. Buckle is the historian often credited with coining the phrase “Dark Ages” as a label for a period of English history. These
Some 868 years ago today, on 24 October 1147, the city of Lisbon fell to a combined force of besiegers from England, Scotland, Germany, Holland and France. Thanks to a surviving report written by an eyewitness
According to the morning headlines, today Pope Francis is set to announce an overhaul of the rules governing marriage that apply, in principle anyway, to the world’s one billion Catholics. The intention is to make
There are not many people who appear in the indexes of all three of these books, on quite different topics: A Handbook of Medieval Sexuality; Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450-900; and The