Chronicles
10 best books like Chronicles (Jean Froissart): The Treasure of the City of Ladies, The History of the Franks, Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, The Romance of the Rose, The Journey Through Wales & The Description of Wales, Two Lives of Charlemagne, A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, Chronicles of the Crusades
| Author | Christine de Pizan |
| ISBN | 0140449507 |
Written by Europe’s first professional woman writer, The Treasure of the City of Ladies offers advice and guidance to women of all ages and from all levels of medieval society, from royal courtiers to prostitutes. It paints an intricate picture of daily life in the courts and streets of fifteenth-century...
| Author | Gregory of Tours |
| ISBN | 0140442952 |
Written following the collapse of Rome's secular control over western Europe, the History of Gregory (c. AD 539-594) is a fascinating exploration of the events that shaped sixth-century France. This volume contains all ten books from the work, the last seven of which provide an in-depth description...
Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, the Orkneyinga Saga is an intriguing fusion of myth, legend and history. The only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action, it tells of an era when the islands were still part of the Viking world, beginning with their conquest...
| Author | Guillaume de Lorris |
| ISBN | 0192839489 |
This is a new translation of The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical account of the progress of a courtly love affair which became the most popular and influential of all medieval romances. In the hands of Jean de Meun, who continued de Lorris's work, it assumed vast proportions and embraced almost every...
| Author | Gerald of Wales |
| ISBN | 0140443398 |
Gerald of Wales was one of the most dynamic and colorful churchmen of the 12th century. His JOURNEY describes a mission to Wales undertaken in 1188 by Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, with Gerald as his companion. THE DESCRIPTION provides a picture of the day-to-day existence of ordinary Welshmen...
| Author | Einhard |
| ISBN | 0140442138 |
Two revealingly different accounts of the life of the most important figure of the Roman Empire
Charlemage, known as the father of Europe, was one of the most powerful and dynamic of all medieval rulers. The biographies brought together here provide a rich and varied portrait of the king from...
| Author | Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson |
| ISBN | 0140442472 |
Including works from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Manx, this Celtic Miscellany offers a rich blend of poetry and prose from the eighth to the nineteenth century, and provides a unique insight into the minds and literature of the Celtic people. It is a literature dominated...
| Author | John Mandeville |
| ISBN | 0141441437 |
Ostensibly written by an English knight, the Travels purport to relate his experiences in the Holy Land, Egypt, India and China. Mandeville claims to have served in the Great Khan's army, and to have travelled in 'the lands beyond' - countries populated by dog-headed men, cannibals, Amazons and Pygmies....
| Author | Asser |
| ISBN | 0140444092 |
This is a great book to get hold of if you are interested in the Anglo-Saxons or early medieval history. It's packed full of source material - enough to get the curious going, not just Asser's life of Alfred which fascinatingly stops well before Alfred's death (did Asser just die unbeknown to us before...
| Author | Jean de Joinville |
| ISBN | 0140441247 |
Two famous, firsthand accounts of the holy war in the Middle Ages translated by Margaret R. B. Shaw
Originally composed in Old French, the two chronicles brought together here offer some of the most vivid and reliable accounts of the Crusades from a Western perspective. Villehardouin's Conquest...
| Author | Snorri Sturluson |
| ISBN | 0140441832 |
This compelling Icelandic history describes the life of King Harald Hardradi, from his battles across Europe and Russia to his final assault on England in 1066, less than three weeks before the invasion of William the Conqueror. It was a battle that led to his death and marked the end of an era in which...
| Author | Anna Comnena |
| ISBN | 0140442154 |
'The shining light of the world, the great Alexius'
Anna Comnena (1083-1153) wrote The Alexiad as an account of the reign of her father, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I. It is also an important source of information on the Byzantine war with the Normans, and the First Crusade, in which Alexius...
| Author | Michael Psellus |
| ISBN | 0140441697 |
A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine...
| Author | Wilfred Lewis Warren |
| ISBN | 0520034945 |
Henry II was an enigma to contemporaries, and has excited widely divergent judgments ever since. Dramatic incidents of his reign, such as his quarrel with Archbishop Becket and his troubled relations with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his sons, have attracted the attention of historical novelists,...
| Author | Peter R.L. Brown |
| ISBN | 0226076229 |
Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the cult of the saints was the dominant form of religion in Christian Europe. In this elegantly written work, Peter Brown explores the role of tombs, shrines, relics, and pilgrimages connected with the sacred bodies of the saints. He shows how men and...
| Author | Pierre Corneille |
| ISBN | 1419142542 |
Pierre Corneille was a 17th century dramatist who produced plays over a 40 year span. Along with Moliere and Racine he is considered to be the founder of French tragedy. He is best known for El Cid which was a 1636 tragic/comedy. Written in 1641 Polyeucte was based on the life of the martyr Saint Polyeuctus....
| Author | Barbara A. Hanawalt |
| ISBN | 0195045645 |
Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth-...
| Author | Marc Bloch |
| ISBN | 0226059782 |
What I particularly enjoy about Bloch's study is the sense of feudal Europe as dynamic. Institutions are changing while different areas are developing in different ways and influencing each other. Waves of immigrant Magyars, Vikings and Muslims are sweeping, sailing and galloping in from the edges...
| Author | R.W. Southern |
| ISBN | 0300002300 |
An acknolwedged classic of european history, R.W. Southern's "The Middle Ages" focuses on the period between 900 and 1200 A.D. His geopgraphic focus is mostly northern france, with some asides to Germany, Italy, Southern France and England. His main thesis is the idea that this period saw the emergence...
| Author | Maurice Keen |
| ISBN | 0300107676 |
Chivalry—with its pageants, heraldry, and knights in shining armor—was a social ideal that had a profound influence on the history of early modern Europe. In this eloquent and richly detailed book, a leading medieval historian discusses the complex reality of chivalry: its secular foundations,...
Revelations of the Medieval World
| Author | Philippe Ariès |
| ISBN | 0674400011 |
This is vol. 2 of the epic, five volume set. Normally, I can see how a reader might shy away from the prospect of reading five volumes on a single subject (any subject). However, given the time span covered and the all encompassing nature of the topic, private life, this is one five volume "history of" set...
The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337-1453
| Author | Desmond Seward |
| ISBN | 0140283617 |
"DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT I LIVE BY WAR AND THAT PEACE WOULD BE MY UNDOING?" -Sir John HawkwoodFrom 1337 to 1453 England repeatedly invaded France on the pretext that her kings had a right to the French throne. Though it was a small, poor country, England for most of those "hundred years" won the battles, sacked...
| Author | Madeleine Pelner Cosman |
What did people who lived during the Middle Ages eat? How did they eat? Dr. Cosman proves just how endlessly intriguing the answers to these questions are in this fascinating exploration of medieval food habits in service, table manners, menu, and courtly magnificence. Also provided are tempting...
