Miri Rubin

The Middle Ages (c.500-1500) includes a thousand years of European history. In this Very Short Introduction Miri Rubin tells the story of the times through the people and their lifestyles. Including stories of kingship and Christian salvation, agriculture and trade, Rubin demonstrates the remarkable nature and legacy of the Middle Ages.

A Very Short Introduction

The Middle Ages

There is no more haunting, compelling period in England's history that the later Middle Ages. The extraordinary kings - Edward III, Henry V, Richard II, Henry VI and Richard III. The events - the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt. The artistic achievements - the great churches, castles and tombs that still dominate the landscape. Originally publ.

A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (TPB) (GRP)

The Hollow Crown

the meaning of Mary in medieval religious cultures

Emotion and devotion

During the late medieval period, accusations that Jews had abused Christ by desecrating the Eucharist created a powerful anti-Jewish movement and violent clashes quickly spread throughout Europe.

The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews

Gentile Tales

A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages

Cambridge University Press

Timothy Tackett

Thomas F. X. Noble

Stewart Jay Brown

K. Scott Bowie

Frances Margaret Young

Hugh McLeod

Brian Stanley

Sheridan Gilley

Walter Simons

Julia M. H. Smith

R. Po-chia Hsia

Roberta A. Baranowski

Frederick W. Norris

Michael Angold

Augustine Casiday

Margaret Mary Mitchell

Emeritus Professor of Church History Hugh McLeod

A comprehensive history of Christianity in the century when it truly became a global religion.

The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 9, World Christianities C.1914-c.2000

During the early middle ages, Europe developed complex and varied Christian cultures, and from about 1100 secular rulers, competing factions and inspired individuals continued to engender a diverse and ever-changing mix within Christian society. This volume explores the wide range of institutions, practices and experiences associated with the life of European Christians in the later middle ages. The clergy of this period initiated new approaches to the role of priests, bishops and popes, and developed an ambitious project to instruct the laity. For lay people, the practices of parish religion were central, but many sought additional ways to enrich their lives as Christians. Impulses towards reform and renewal periodically swept across Europe, led by charismatic preachers and supported by secular rulers. This book provides accessible accounts of these complex historical processes and entices the reader towards further enquiry.

The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500

A sweeping, ambitious study of the Virgin Mary’s emergence and role throughout Western historyHow did the Virgin Mary, about whom very little is said in the Gospels, become one of the most powerful and complex religious figures in the world? To arrive at the answers to this far-reaching question, one of our foremost medieval historians, Miri Rubin, investigates the ideas, practices, and images that have developed around the figure of Mary from the earliest decades of Christianity to around the year 1600. Drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of sources—including music, poetry, theology, art, scripture, and miracle tales—Rubin reveals how Mary became so embedded in our culture that it is impossible to conceive of Western history without her.In her rise to global prominence, Mary was continually remade and reimagined by wave after wave of devotees. Rubin shows how early Christians endowed Mary with a fine ancestry; why in early medieval Europe her roles as mother, bride, and companion came to the fore; and how the focus later shifted to her humanity and unparalleled purity. She also explores how indigenous people in Central America, Africa, and Asia remade Mary and so fit her into their own cultures.Beautifully written and finely illustrated, this book is a triumph of sympathy and intelligence. It demonstrates Mary’s endless capacity to inspire and her profound presence in Christian cultures and beyond.

A History of the Virgin Mary

Mother of God

Medieval Christianity in Practice provides readers with a sweeping look at the religious practices of the European Middle Ages. Comprising forty-two selections from primary source materials--each translated with an introduction and commentary by a specialist in the field--the collection illustrates the religious cycles, rituals, and experiences that gave meaning to medieval Christian individuals and communities. This volume of Princeton Readings in Religions assembles sources reflecting different genres, regions, and styles, including prayer books, chronicles, diaries, liturgical books, sermons, hagiography, and handbooks for the laity and clergy. The texts represent the practices through which Christians conducted their individual, family, and community lives, and explores such life-cycle events as birth, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death, and burial. The texts also document religious practices related to themes of work, parish life, and devotions, as well as power and authority. Enriched by expert analysis and suggestions for further reading, Medieval Christianity in Practice gives students and general readers alike the necessary background and foundations for an appreciation of the creativity and multiplicity of medieval Christian religious culture.

Medieval Christianity in Practice

Cities of Strangers illuminates life in European towns and cities as it was for the settled, and for the 'strangers' or newcomers who joined them between 1000 and 1500. Some city-states enjoyed considerable autonomy which allowed them to legislate on how newcomers might settle and become citizens in support of a common good. Such communities invited bankers, merchants, physicians, notaries and judges to settle and help produce good urban living. Dynastic rulers also shaped immigration, often inviting groups from afar to settle and help their cities flourish. All cities accommodated a great deal of difference - of language, religion, occupation - in shared spaces, regulated by law. When this benign cycle broke down around 1350 with demographic crisis and repeated mortality, less tolerant and more authoritarian attitudes emerged, resulting in violent expulsions of even long-settled groups. Tracing the development of urban institutions and using a wide range of sources from across Europe, Miri Rubin recreates a complex picture of urban life for settled and migrant communities over the course of five centuries, and offers an innovative vantage point on Europe's past with insights for its present.

Making Lives in Medieval Europe

Cities of Strangers

David Abulafia

Michael J. Franklin

This volume of essays is intended as a tribute to the distinguished medieval historian Christopher Brooke. It addresses new questions in areas of medieval history which Professor Brooke has made his own: urban life and religious life. The fourteen essays explore the coexistence of religious ideas and ecclesiastical institutions with urban practices and townspeople. They span five hundred years of the history of western Christendom, ranging from Magdeburg to Majorca, and from Cambridge to Cluny. The essays break new ground in a number of areas in medieval history: in economic history, the history of ideas, and the history of religious institutions. The contributors have been attuned throughout to the complex interactions of groups and ideas within urban space. The book also contains a bibliography of Christopher Brooke's writings and an appreciation of his work.

Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke

Church and City, 1000-1500

Essays on medieval history inspired by, and engaging with, the work of Jacques Le Goff.

The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History

Ira Katznelson

Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

History, Experience and Meaning

Religious Conversion

Comprising forty-two selections from primary source materials, each translated with an introduction and commentary by a specialist in the field, this collection illustrates the religious cycles, rituals, and experiences that gave meaning to medieval Christian individuals and communities. The texts represent the practices through which Christians conducted their individual, family, and community lives and explore such life-cycle events as birth, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death, and burial. The texts also document religious practices related to themes of work, parish life, and devotions, as well as power and authority.--From publisher's description.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is one of the most powerful, influential and complex of all religious figures. The focus for women, the inspiration of faith, the subject of innumerable paintings, sculptures, pieces of music and churches, Mary is so entangled in our world that it is impossible to conceive of the history of Western culture and religion without her. Miri Rubin�s Mother of God is a major work of cultural imagination. Mary�s role in the Gospels is a relatively minor one, and yet in the centuries during which Christianity established itself she emerged as a powerful, strange and ungovernable force, endlessly remade and reimagined by wave after wave of devotees, ultimately becoming �a sort of God�, in ways that have always made some Christians uneasy. Whether talking about the vast public festivals celebrating Mary that sweep up entire communities or the intense private agony of individual devotion, Rubin�s book is a triumph of sympathy and intelligence. Throughout Christianity�s journey from mysterious origins to global religion, the Mother of God has been a profound presence in countless lives � Mother of God is the story of that presence and a book that raises profound questions about the human experience.

This is a detailed study of the forms in which charitable giving was organised in medieval Cambridge and Cambridgeshire, unravelling the economic and demographic factors which created the need for relief as well as the forms in which the community offered it.

Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge

Sarah Kay

This text offers a wide-ranging analysis of the medieval body and its representations, covering the cultural, historical, literary and archaeological dimensions of the subject.

Framing Medieval Bodies

Katherine Ludwig Jansen

This series is concerned with the relationship between religon, society, culture, and identity in Europe from the early medieval period to the end of the ancien regime, with particular emphasis on continuity and transformation within urban religious life and institutions. The series concentrates on medieval on Europe, though may also include North Africa and the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on studies that focus on history in the longue duree. This volume of essays concentrates on the effects of preaching in late medieval and early modern Europe, particularly through the concept of charisma, a term introduced into the discussion of religion and politics by Max Weber, Used by Weber, the term indicates the power of a person to move others to action, to animate and mobilize them. The late medieval and early modern periods witnessed the emergence of preachers who became powerful public figures central to the mobilization of populations towards religious reform or crusades. Such preachers were also enmeshed in civic life and the life of courts. Super-preachers like Bernardino of Siena and John of Capestrano shaped opinion on a wide range of issues: the ethics of business, marriage and gender relations, attitudes towards minorities, the poor and social responsibility, as well as the role of kings and other rulers in society. Preaching events were the mass media of the day, and in their wake could follow pogrom, lay revival, crusade, peace movement, or reconciliation within a faction-riven city. The power of these events was great and not merely confined to the Christian community. This volume introduces for the first time a comparative dimension which looks at the theme of charisma and religious authority in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim preaching traditions.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200-1500

Charisma and Religious Authority

A paperback edition of Miri Rubin's highly successful study of the meaning of the eucharist, c. 1150-1500.

The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture

Corpus Christi

Explores how medieval towns and cities received newcomers, and the process by which these 'strangers' became 'neighbours' between 1000 and 1500.

Miri Rubin

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