A Tale of ARMS, of DEATH, of LOVE, and of HONOR Set against the turbulent backdrop of the Hundred Years' War, I Serve chronicles the story of Sir John Potenhale. A young Englishman of lowly birth, Potenhale wins his way to knighthood on the fields of France. He enters the service of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales, and immerses himself in a stormy world of war, politics, and romantic intrigue. While campaigning in France, Potenhale develops an interest in Margery, a spirited lady-in-waiting with a close-kept secret. He soon learns that Sir Thomas Holland, a crass and calculating baron, holds the key to unlock Margery's mystery and possesses the power to overturn all of his hopes. When the Black Death strikes Europe, however, Potenhale realizes that the fiercest enemy does not always appear in human form. Seeing the pestilence as a punishment for the sins of his generation, he questions his calling as a knight and considers entering the cloister. Margery or the monastery? Torn between losing his soul and losing the love of his life, he finds friendship with a French knight who might-just possibly-help him save both.

Iris Murdoch produced twenty-six novels in forty years. The last of these, Jackson's Dilemma, was published in 1995, four years before her death. Murdoch's interest in moral problems inclined her towards what could be seen as an unusual view of human character and human life, leading her to create bizarre situations and offer unsettling solutions which frequently challenge and intrigue the reader. This essential introduction to one of Britain's best-known writers guides the reader through the full range of Murdoch's fictional output, tracing basic patterns which run throughout Murdoch's work and showing how the novels help to elucidate one another. The revised, updated and expanded new edition takes into account certain details which have emerged following Murdoch's death in 1999, incorporates the latest scholarship and offers fuller treatment of a number of novels. The second edition also gives more weight to the development of the moral discourse which is predominant in Murdoch's work. From the mid-sixties onwards, Murdoch was intensely concerned with the problems of Good and Evil in a godless world. In the later novels, particularly those of the eighties and nineties, she posited the possibility of mystic personalities who influence others from a position beyond the normal parameters of our world. Hilda D. Spear examines these mystic, and mysterious, fictions in the later chapters of her study, and argues that Jackson's Dilemma should be viewed as Murdoch's 'unfinished novel'.

This “taut narrative” of the fourteenth-century conflict between England and France offers “a detailed, climactic account of a legendary battle” (Publishers Weekly). The epic fourteenth-century Battle of Poitiers marked a major turn in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Prince Edward, known to all as the Black Prince, not only won a surprising victory in his first campaign as commander, but managed the nearly impossible feat of taking the French monarch, King Jean II, prisoner. In the summer of 1356, Prince Edward drove toward the Loire Valley, deep in French territory. There, he met the full French army led by King Jean and a number of French nobles, including veterans of the defeat at Crécy ten years before. Outnumbered, the Prince fell back, but in September, he turned near the city of Poitiers to make a stand. Historians Witzel and Livingstone provide a day-by-day description of the campaign of July to September 1356, climaxing with a vivid description of the Battle of Poitiers itself. The detailed account and analysis of the battle and the campaigns that led up to it has a strong focus on the people involved in the campaign: ordinary men-at-arms and noncombatants, as well as princes and nobles.

Leaving her Dominican Order to stand by a cousin who has been condemned to death by Henry VIII, novice Joanna Stafford and her father are arrested and ordered by the Bishop of Winchester to recover a religious artifact believed to hold a sacred power.

Donated by Sydney Harris.