"Here is the first full translation into English of one of the 20th century's few undoubted classics of history." —Washington Post Book World The Autumn of the Middle Ages is Johan Huizinga's classic portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Few who have read this book in English realize that The Waning of the Middle Ages, the only previous translation, is vastly different from the original Dutch, and incompatible will all other European-language translations. For Huizinga, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in history—the Renaissance—but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval life and thought. However, his work was criticized both at home and in Europe for being "old-fashioned" and "too literary" when The Waning of the Middle Ages was first published in 1919. In the 1924 translation, Fritz Hopman adapted, reduced and altered the Dutch edition—softening Huizinga's passionate arguments, dulling his nuances, and eliminating theoretical passages. He dropped many passages Huizinga had quoted in their original old French. Additionally, chapters were rearranged, all references were dropped, and mistranslations were introduced. This translation corrects such errors, recreating the second Dutch edition which represents Huizinga's thinking at its most important stage. Everything that was dropped or rearranged has been restored. Prose quotations appear in French, with translations preprinted at the bottom of the page, mistranslations have been corrected. "The advantages of the new translation are so many. . . . It is one of the greatest, as well as one of the most enthralling, historical classics of the twentieth century, and everyone will surely want to read it in the form that was obviously intended by the author." —Francis Haskell, New York Review of Books "A once pathbreaking piece of historical interpretation. . . . This new translation will no doubt bring Huizinga and his pioneering work back into the discussion of historical interpretation." —Rosamond McKitterick, New York Times Book Review

“The Leaves of Autumn: Meditations on Middle Age” is artist Marques Vickers photographic survey portraying the variety and vibrant colors of seasonally shedding foliage. Vickers combines his colorfully captured imagery with a meditative essay comparing the annual rite with the entrance and emergence of middle age. Nearly 120 images portray the diversity of autumn colors. FROM THE PREFACE: “For those drawn into middle age, the realization of our own mortality becomes poignantly real. Death is no longer a random phenomena. We have viewed its presence firsthand through the passing of family, friends and a parade of humanity we have been spectators to observe. In late autumn, the days begin to recede in sunlight and length. The cooling temperatures trigger hormonal changes within trees signaling change. Cells appear at the juncture where leaves are attached. These abscission cells over a period of days and weeks multiply into a thin barrier that separates the leaf from its stem. This separation creates a vulnerability to shifting and tugging winds. The tree consciously seals off this linkage for self-preservation. This innate annually repeated cycle enables trees to survive the inclimate weather of winter, deficient of sunshine. During spring, summer and early fall, leaves draw their nutrients from sunlight enabling the tree to survive, reproduce and flourish. As the days slow and shorten, the leave’s capacities to produce lessen until they ultimately become a burden. At this point, they become disposable. Before they are tossed into oblivion by prevailing winds, leaves modify their tonality and patina. Their colors radiate with illumination, subtlety and vibrancy. Each eschews the monotone of their previous greens and yellow tinting. Individually and collectively, they radiate gorgeous symphonic overtones, if only for a short span. The vision of autumn leaves reflects a metaphor of existence. We hope that we may cast an enduring shadow long after our own substance has passed.”

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume I examines 'Peoples and Place', assessing structural factors such as climate, printing and the revolution in information, social and economic developments, and religion, including chapters on Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam.

Interest in the middle ages is at an all time high at the moment, thanks in part to "The Da Vinci Code." Never has there been a moment more propitious for a study of our misconceptions of the Middle Ages than now. Ranging across religion, art, and science, Misconceptions about the Middle Ages unravels some of the many misinterpretations that have evolved concerning the medieval period, including: the church war science art society With an impressive international array of contributions, the book will be essential reading for students and scholars involved with medieval religion, history, and culture.

The concept of a Northern European 'Renaissance' in the arts, in thought, and in more general culture north of the Alps often evokes the idea of a cultural transplant which was not indigenous to, or rooted in, the society from which it emerged. Classic definitions of the European 'Renaissance' during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries have often seen it as an Italian import of, for example, humanism and classical learning into the Gothic North. There were certainly differences between North and South which have to be addressed, not least in the development of the visual arts. In this book, Malcolm Vale argues for a Northern Renaissance which, while cognisant of Italian developments, had a life of its own, expressed through such innovations as a rediscovery of pictorial space and representational realism, and which displayed strong continuities with the indigenous cultures of northern Europe. But it also contributed new movements and tendencies in thought, the visual arts, literature, religious beliefs and the dissemination of knowledge which often stemmed from, and built upon, those continuities. A Short History of the Renaissance in Northern Europe – while in no way ignoring or diminishing the importance of the Greek and Roman legacy – seeks other sources, and different uses of classical antiquity, for a rather different kind of 'Renaissance' in the North.

This book revives the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes.

Disease and Society in Premodern England examines the impact of infectious disease in England from the everyday to pandemics in the period c. 500–c. 1600, with the major focus from the eleventh century onward. Theilmann blends historical research, using a variety of primary sources, with an understanding of disease drawn from current scientific literature to enable a better understanding of how diseases affected society and why they were so difficult to combat in the premodern world. The volume provides a perspective on how society and medicine reacted to "new" diseases, something that remains an issue in the twenty-first century. The "new" diseases of the Late Middle Ages, such as plague, syphilis, and the English Sweat, are viewed as helping to lead to a change in how people viewed disease causation and treatment. In addition to the biology of disease and its relationship with environmental factors, the social, economic, political, religious, and artistic impacts of various diseases are also explored. With discussions on a variety of diseases including leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, typhus, influenza, and smallpox, this volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of medicine and disease in premodern England.

What do we know of the emotional life of the Middle Ages? Though a long-neglected subject, a multitude of sources – spiritual and secular literature, iconography, chronicles, as well as theological and medical works – provide clues to the central role emotions played in medieval society. In this work, historians Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy delve into a rich variety of texts and images to reveal the many and nuanced experiences of emotion during the Middle Ages – from the demonstrative shame of a saint to a nobleman's fear of embarrassment, from the enthusiasm of a crusading band to the fear of a town threatened by the approach of war or plague. Boquet and Nagy show how these outbursts of joy and pain, while universal expressions, must be understood within the specific context of medieval society. During the Middle Ages, a Christian model of affectivity was formed in the ‘laboratory’ of the monasteries, one which gradually seeped into wider society, interacting with the sensibilities of courtly culture and other forms of expression. Bouqet and Nagy bring a thousand years of history to life, demonstrating how the study of emotions in medieval society can also allow us to understand better our own social outlooks and customs.

Whilst French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have long enjoyed a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been largely neglected by modern scholars, despite their central role in the chivalric culture of the day. In particular, although this genre has been seen as providing a forum within which ideas about masculine and feminine roles were debated and prescribed, little work has been done on the gender ideology of texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This study seeks to fill this gap in the scholarship by analysing how the views of gender found in earlier romances were reassessed and reshaped in the texts produced in the moralising intellectual environment of the later medieval period. In order to explore these topics, this book discusses fifteen historico-realist prose romances written in the century from 1390, many of which were commissioned at the court of Burgundy. It addresses key issues in recent studies of gender in medieval culture including the construction of chivalric masculinity, the representation of adolescent desire, and the social and sexual roles of husbands and wives. In addition to offering close readings of these texts, it shows how the romances of the period were informed by ideas about gender which circulated in contemporary works such as manuals of chivalry, moral treatises, and marriage sermons. It thus aims not only to provide the first in-depth study of this little-known area of French literary history, but also to question the critical consensus on the role of gender in medieval romance that has arisen from an exclusive focus on earlier works in the genre.

The changing understandings of the Middle Ages from the Age of Reason to the present, and how these relate to wider historiographical and philosophical developments.