A World by Itself
A World by Itself

Author: Jonathan Clark

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2015-10-29

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 144649666X

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Scholarship on the history of the British Isles is currently experiencing a golden age. The breakdown of modernism and the eclipse of both the Marxist tradition and the 'Whig interpretation' that sees all history as progress, combined with the trajectories of nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have generated unprecedented intellectual activity. Nor has the world stood still: the collapse of communism, the issue of integration into the EU, and the advance of multiculturalism have led more and more people in the English speaking world as a whole to sense that their collective landscape now looks profoundly different from that inhabited by their ancestors even a few decades ago. In A World By Itself, six distinguished historians offer the most definitive and compelling history of the British Isles to date. Tracing the political, religious and material cultures from the Romans to the present day, this is at once an urgent reassessment of our shared past, and an inspirational celebration of British history. It focuses on the major themes and most dramatic moments of the last two millenia: the rise and fall of empires; reformation, revolution and restoration; wars both civil and global; and the enduring question of what it means to be British.

The Medieval Irish Kings and the English Invasion
The Medieval Irish Kings and the English Invasion

Author: Seán Ó Hoireabhárd

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2024-10-04

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1835538312

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When Henry II accepted the Leinster king Diarmait Mac Murchada as his liegeman in 1166, he forged a bond between the English crown and Ireland that has never been undone. Ireland was to be changed forever as a result of the momentous events that followed – so much so that it is normal for professional historians to specialise in either the pre- or post-invasion period. Here, for the first time, is an account of the impact of the English invasion on the Irish kingdoms in the context of their strategies across the whole twelfth century. Ireland’s leading men battled for spheres of influence, for recognition of their hegemonies and, ultimately, for the coveted title of ‘king of Ireland’. But what did it mean to be the king of Ireland when no one dynasty had secured their hold on it? This book takes a close look at each pretender, asking what it meant to them – and whether the political dynamics surrounding the role had an impact on the course of the invasion itself.

Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland
Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland

Author: Jane Wong

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-10

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1000011968

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Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare examines the problems that beset the Tudor administration of Ireland through a range of selected 16th century English narratives. This book is primarily concerned with the period between 1541 and 1603. This bracket provides a framework that charts early modern Irish history from the constitutional change of the island from lordship to kingdom to the end of the conquest in 1603. The mounting impetus to bring Ireland to a "complete" conquest during these years has, quite naturally, led critics to associate England’s reform strategies with Irish Otherness. The preoccupation with this discourse of difference is also perceived as the "Irish Problem," a blanket term broadly used to describe just about every aspect of Irishness incompatible with the English imperialist ideologies. The term stresses everything that is "wrong" with the Irish nation—Ireland was a problem to be resolved. This book takes a different approach towards the "Irish Problem." Instead of rehashing the English government’s complaints of the recalcitrant Irish and the long struggle to impose royal authority in Ireland, I posit that the "Irish Problem" was very much shaped and developed by a larger "English Problem," namely English dissent within the English government. The discussions in this book focuse on the ways in which English writers articulated their knowledge and anxieties of the "English Problem" in sixteenth-century literary and historical narratives. This book reappraises the limitations of the "Irish Problem," and argues that the crown’s failure to control dissent within its own ranks was as detrimental to the conquest as the "Irish Problem," if not more so, and finally, it attempts to demonstrate how dissent translate into governance and conquest in early modern Ireland.

Lost Heirs of the Medieval Crown
Lost Heirs of the Medieval Crown

Author: J. F. Andrews

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2019-10-30

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1526736527

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“A fascinating study of the also-rans and almost-made-its of medieval history . . . Beautifully written and well researched, it is an engaging read.” —History . . . The Interesting Bits! When William the Conqueror died in 1087, he left the throne of England to William Rufus . . . his second son. The result was an immediate war as Rufus’s elder brother Robert fought to gain the crown he saw as rightfully his; this conflict marked the start of 400 years of bloody disputes as the English monarchy’s line of hereditary succession was bent, twisted and finally broken when the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, fell at Bosworth in 1485. The Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet dynasties were renowned for their internecine strife, and in Lost Heirs we will unearth the hidden stories of fratricidal brothers, usurping cousins and murderous uncles; the many kings—and the occasional queen—who should have been but never were. History is written by the winners, but every game of thrones has its losers too, and their fascinating stories bring richness and depth to what is a colorful period of history. King John would not have gained the crown had he not murdered his young nephew, who was in line to become England’s first King Arthur; Henry V would never have been at Agincourt had his father not seized the throne by usurping and killing his cousin; and as the rival houses of York and Lancaster fought bloodily over the crown during the Wars of the Roses, life suddenly became very dangerous indeed for a young boy named Edmund. “A journey through the minefield of opposing factions fighting for the crown of England.” —Books Monthly

A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages
A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages

Author: Thomas Hahn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350300004

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This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period. Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations

Hindsight in Greek and Roman History
Hindsight in Greek and Roman History

Author: Anton Powell

Publisher: Classical Press of Wales

Published: 2013-12-31

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1910589128

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Nine new studies here explore, and reconstruct, determinant episodes of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman history. The authors argue that hindsight - especially in modern works - has falsified the past, by playing down or eliminating the record of ancient unfulfilled forecasts, and of trends in events which in the long term did not obviously prove predominant. The authors also highlight the efforts of the best-placed writers in Antiquity not to be misled by hindsight, but rather to give due weight to the working of hopes and fears, and of trends in events, which with remote retrospect would tend to be belittled or forgotten. The techniques demonstrated in this book open new fields of research across Ancient History: they illuminate almost every ancient episode for which there is evidence of what historical agents planned or anticipated. The authors show convincingly that, by giving due respect to trends observable, and to political predictions made, in Antiquity, historians of today are better placed to evaluate outcomes: to see how easily events might have developed differently, or even to show that concrete outcomes were different from those conventionally portrayed from hindsight.

A Useful History of Britain
A Useful History of Britain

Author: Michael Braddick

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0198848307

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This is a short history of the political life of this island over a very long period, showing how history can speak clearly to current political debates.

England in the Age of Chivalry . . . And Awful Diseases
England in the Age of Chivalry . . . And Awful Diseases

Author: Ed West

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1510719938

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A revealing glimpse into the tumultuous history of England’s medieval period, full of knights in shining armor and terrible peasant suffering. Covering the violent and disease-ridden period between 1272 to 1399, England in the Age of Chivalry. . . And Awful Diseases covers the events, personages and ideas most commonly known as "medieval". This includes Geoffrey Chaucer, the Peasants revolt, the Scottish wars of independence, the Great Famine of 1315, the Black Death and the 100 Years War. Central to this time is King Edward III, who started the 100 Years War and defined the concept of chivalry, including England's order of the garter. His legacy continues to shape our view of England’s history and is crucial in understanding the development of Europe.

The Growth of Royal Government Under Henry III
The Growth of Royal Government Under Henry III

Author: David Crook

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1783270675

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A survey of the complexity and sophistication of English royal government in the thirteenth century, a period of radical change. The years between 1258 and 1276 comprise one of the most influential periods in the Middle Ages in Britain. This turbulent decade witnessed a bitter power struggle between Henry III and his barons over who should control the government of the realm. Before England eventually descended into civil war, a significant proportion of the baronage had attempted to transform its governance by imposing on the crown a programme of legislative and administrative reform far more radical and wide-ranging than Magna Carta in 1215. Constituting a critical stage in the development of parliament, the reformist movement would remain unsurpassed in its radicalism until the upheavals of the seventeenth century. Simon de Montfort, the baronial champion, became the first leader of a political movement to seize power and govern in the king's name. The essays here draw on material available for the first time via the completion of the project to calendar all the Fine Rolls of Henry III; these rolls comprise the last series of records of the English Chancery from that period to become readily available in a convenient form, thereby transforming accessto several important fields of research, including financial, legal, political and social issues. The volume covers topics including the evidential value of the fine rolls themselves and their wider significance for the English polity, developments in legal and financial administration, the roles of women and the church, and the fascinating details of the development of the office of escheator. Related or parallel developments in Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also dealt with, giving a broader British dimension. LOUISE J. WILKINSON is Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Lincoln; DAVID CROOK is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Notthingham. Contributors: Nick Barratt, Paul Brand, David Carpenter, David Crook, Paul Dryburgh, Beth Hartland, Philippa Hoskin, Charles Insley, Adrian Jobson, Tony Moore, Alice Taylor, Nicholas Vincent, Scott Waugh, Louise Wilkinson