A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

This clear-cut, accurate, and richly detailed guide is much more than just another history of costume. It takes an effective and fresh approach, classifying the clothes and accessories of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries along social lines. Garments of every type from the wardrobes of peasants not as inanimate museum exhibits but as items of vital interest and well worth recreating. Here is the apparel of royalty, clerics, doctors, merchants,...

The reissue of Joseph and Frances Gies's classic bestseller on life in medieval villages. This new reissue of Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural people at work and at play in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the village of Elton, in the English East Midlands, the Gieses detail the agricultural advances that made communal living possible, explain what domestic life...

Describes the daily life and customs of the Vikings and examines their many roles as farmers, traders, explorers. raiders, colonizers, and mercenaries.

A new translation of the Renaissance work comprising the one hundred short stories that ten young Florentines tell each other as they're passing the time in the countryside around Fiesole, attempting to escape the Black Death.

For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing...

"Fancy a leap back in time to the kitchens in the Middle Ages, where cauldrons bubbled over hearths, whole oxen were roasted over spits, and common cooking ingredients included verjuice, barley, peafowl, frumenty, and elder flowers? You, too, can learn the art of gode cookery--or, at least, come close to it. With gorgeous and whimsical hand-drawn illustrations from beginning to end, A Thyme and Place is both a cookbook and a history for foodies and...

"Take readers back in time with medieval-inspired crafts! Step-by-step instructions direct readers in making a knight's helmet and shield, a fool's mask, a tabletop catapult, and more in this fun illustrated guide"--Provided by publisher.