Chronicles
Chronicles

Author: Jean Froissart

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 1978-04-27

Total Pages: 734

ISBN-13: 0141904569

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The Chronicles of Froissart (1337-1410) are one of the greatest contemporary records of fourteenth-century England and France. Depicting the great age of Anglo-French rivalry from the deposition of Edward II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart powerfully portrays the deeds of knights in battle at Sluys, Crecy, Calais and Poitiers during the Hundred Years War. Yet they are only part of this vigorous portrait of medieval life, which also vividly describes the Peasants' Revolt, trading activities and diplomacy against a backdrop of degenerate nobility. Written with the same sense of curiosity about character and customs that underlies the works of Froissart's contemporary, Chaucer, the Chronicles are a magnificent evocation of the age of chivalry.

The True Chronicles of Jean Le Bel, 1290-1360
The True Chronicles of Jean Le Bel, 1290-1360

Author: Jehan Le Bel

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1843836947

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Even as a canon, he lived in princely style, with a retinue of two knights and forty squires, and he wrote at the request of John of Hainault, the uncle of queen Philippa. He was thus able to draw directly on the verbal accounts of the Crécy campaign given to him by soldiers from Hainault who had fought on both sides; and his description of warfare in Scotland is the most realistic account of what it was like to be on campaign that survives from this period.

Chronicles of the First Crusade
Chronicles of the First Crusade

Author: Christopher Tyerman

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 760

ISBN-13: 0141970871

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The story of the First Crusade, as witnessed by contemporary writers 'O day so ardently desired! O time of times the most memorable! O deed before all other deeds!' The fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 to an exhausted and starving army of western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events of the Middle Ages. It was both the climax of a great wave of visionary Christian fervour and the beginning of what proved to be a futile and abortive attempt to implant a new European kingdom of heaven in an overwhelmingly Muslim world. This remarkable collection brings together a wide variety of contemporary accounts of the First Crusade, including Pope Urban II's initial call to arms of 1095, as well as the first-hand writings of priests, knights, a Jewish pilgrim, a destitute noblewoman, an Iraqi poet and the historian Anna Comnena. Together they provide a vivid and nuanced picture of the First Crusade and the people who were swept up in it. Edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Tyerman

La Prison Amoureuse
La Prison Amoureuse

Author: Jean Froissart

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780815303299

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Though best known for his "Chronicles," Froissart was also one of the great poets of the 14th century. The first and perhaps most important disciple of Machaut, he produced courtly narrative "dits," an enormous Arthurian romance ("M liador"), and numerous lyrics. La Prison Amoureuse is probably the most important of his narrative "dits." Inspired by Machaut's "Le Voir Dit," the Prison presents a literary correspondence between a poet and patron, whose names are hidden behind allegorical pseudonyms. The Prison cleverly intercalates the men's prose letters to each other, as well as their lyric compositions, into its narrative frame. Critics have read the work as everything from pure fancy and courtly fluff to a recreation of the letters exchanged between Froissart and his patron, Wenceslas of Luxemburg, during the latter's captivity of 1372. The very difficulty of interpretation makes the "Prison "of importance to scholars interested in the relationship between artists and patrons, and the place of literature in society, during the Hundred Years War. This new edition also provides the first English translation of a major work by a writer who almost certainly knew and influenced Chaucer.

A Distant Mirror
A Distant Mirror

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 1987-07-12

Total Pages: 738

ISBN-13: 0345349571

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A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary