Originally published in 1993, The Medieval Charlemagne Legend is a selective bibliography for the literary scholar, of historical and literary material relating to Charlemagne. The book provides a chronological listing of sources on the legend and man is split into three distinct sections, covering the history of Charlemagne, the literature of Charlemagne and the medieval biography and chronicle of Charlemagne.

In high medieval France, men and women saw the world around them as the product of tensions between opposites. Imbued with a Christian culture in which a penniless preacher was also the King of Kings and the last were expected to be first, twelfth-century thinkers brought order to their lives through the creation of opposing categories. In a highly original work, Constance Brittain Bouchard examines this poorly understood component of twelfth-century thought, one responsible, in her view, for the fundamental strangeness of that culture to modern thinking.Scholars have long recognized that dialectical reasoning was the basic approach to philosophical, legal, and theological matters in the high Middle Ages. Bouchard argues that this way of thinking and categorizing--which she terms a "discourse of opposites"--permeated all aspects of medieval thought. She rejects suggestions that it was the result of imprecision, and provides evidence that people of that era sought not to reconcile opposing categories but rather to maintain them. Bouchard scrutinizes the medieval use of opposites in five broad areas: scholasticism, romance, legal disputes, conversion, and the construction of gender. Drawing on research in a series of previously unedited charters and the earliest glossa manuscripts, she demonstrates that this method of constructing reality was a constitutive element of the thought of the period.

A fascinating, illustrated collection of almost 100 first-hand accounts of the period known as the Middle Ages, roughly from the 4th to the 16th centuries. Revealing the medieval world in all its astonishing diversity, the selections reflect the culture of the people who lived during the period, and the contributions they made to their world and our own.

Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women. Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.

Medieval Europe was a rapidly developing society with a problem of violent disorder. Professor Kaeuper's original and authoritative study reveals that chivalry was just as much a part of this problem as it was its solution. Chivalry praised heroic violence by knights, and fused such displaysof prowess with honour, piety, high-status, and attractiveness to women. Though the vast body of chivalric literature praised chivalry as necessary to civilization, most texts also worried over knightly violence, criticized the ideals and practices of chivalry, and often proposed reforms. Theknights themselves joined the debate, absorbing some reforms, ignoring others, sometimes proposing their own. The interaction of chivalry with major governing institutions ("church" and "state") emerging at that time was similarly complex: kings and clerics both needed and feared the force of theknighthood. This fascinating book lays bare these conflicts and paradoxes which surrounded the concept of chivalry in medieval Europe.

Raoul de Cambrai is one of the most violent and passionate Old French poems of the cycle of barons in revolt. The three relations that structure medieval society - companionship, feudalism, and the family - are here seen in crisis. Conflicts of interest, and the competition for resources,result in social disintegration, wholesale loss of life, and the collapse of authority. The poem, probably composed around the turn of the thirteenth century, results from successive reworkings that weave a many-layered commentary on its own moral and political themes. This first edition for over ahundred years draws on important manuscript material unknown to the text's previous editors. It is prefaced by a scholarly introduction and accompanied by an annotated translation into English prose.

This book considers the role of anger in the social lives and conceptual universes of a varied and significant cross-section of medieval people: monks, saints, kings, lords, and peasants.

"The different cultures from which the middle ages drew its inspiration are represented: Cu Cuchulainn from the Celtic world, Apollonius of Tyre from Greek romance, Attila the Hun and Theodoric the Ostrogoth from the struggle of the Roman empire against the Barbarians. Each entry gives an outline of the story, how it spread through Europe, its modern retelling and appearances in art, and a selective bibliography."--Jacket.