مؤلف: Edward Peters

They were, in the words of one contemporary observer, ‘the Promised Lands.’ In all of Europe, only Northern Italy could rival the economic power and cultural wealth of the Low Countries in the later …

Here presented for the first time in English are the law codes of the Lombard kings who ruled Italy from the sixth to the eighth centuries. The documents afford unparalleled insight into the structur …

‘Gives the reader a portrayal of the social institutions of a Germanic people far richer and more exhaustive than any other available source.’—from the Foreword, by Edward Peters From the bloody clas …

The First Crusade received its name and shape late. To its contemporaries, the event was a journey and the men who took part in it pilgrims. Only later were those participants dubbed Crusaders—’those …

History of the Lombards, by Paul the Deacon (c. 720-c. 799), is among the most important and oldest accounts of the Germanic nation. The book preserves many ancient myths and popular traditions and d …

Next to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, William Langland’s Piers Plowman is perhaps the best-known literary picture of fourteenth-century England. Langland’s work, more socially concerned and critical th …

Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern Europe theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most fundamental levels …

During the thirteenth century, the widespread conviction that the Christian lands in Syria and Palestine were of utmost importance to Christendom, and that their loss was a sure sign of God’s displea …

In 1213, Pope Innocent III issued his letter Vineam Domini, thundering against the enemies of Christendom—the ‘beasts of many kinds that are attempting to destroy the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth’ …

Henry Charles Lea was one of the first American historians to use what would later be termed comparative and anthropological approaches to history. Under his pen, the study of the medieval ordeal bec …

‘Torture has ceased to exist, ‘ Victor Hugo claimed, with some justification, in 1874. Yet more than a century later, torture is used routinely in one out of every three countries. This book is about …

Integrating legal history with the traditional history of the Middle Ages, this classic book meticulously traces early criminal procedure, its development on the Continent, and its imposition on the …

Originally published as part IV of Lea’s Superstition and Force, this volume is one of the most succinct accounts in English of the place of torture in the legal process from the Roman Empire to the …

Originally published as parts I and II of Lea’s major historical work Superstition and Force, this volume discusses the limitations in the Middle Ages of what modern jurists would term private law, o …

The medieval authors represented in this book of readings were engineers of a new culture—responsible colonial administrators of an empire that existed only in the mind and spirit and the traditions …

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1, 100 titles from Penn Press’s distin …

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1, 100 titles from Penn Press’s distin …

Between the age of St. Augustine and the sixteenth century reformations magic continued to be both a matter of popular practice and of learned inquiry. This volume deals with its use in such contexts …