The historical sketches and fragments that are here submitted to the reader deal only with a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period known as the Middle Ages and are intended to arouse a wider interest in that thousand years of Christian history that opens with Clovis and closes with the discovery of the New World. Both in Church and State the life of today is rooted in those ten marvelous centuries of transition, during which the Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines of our history are not intelligible apart from a sufficient understanding of what men thought, hoped, attempted, suffered and founded in the days when there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to Drontheim. The problems that now agitate us and seem to threaten our inherited social order were problems for the medieval man. The conflicts and difficulties that make up the sum of political history for the last five centuries are only the last chapters of a story of surpassing interest that opens with the formal establishment of Christian thought as the basis and norm of social existence and development. The titles of the essays are : "Gregory the Great and the Barbarian World", "Justinian the Great", "The Religion of Islam", "Catholicism in the Middle Ages", "The Christians of St. Thomas", "The Medieval Teacher", "The Book of a Medieval Mother", "German Schools in the Sixteenth Century", "Baths and Bathing in the Middle Ages", "Clergy and People in Medieval England", "The Cathedral Builders of Mediæval Europe", "The Results of the Crusades on the Italian Renaissance."

The British led the way in holidaymaking. This four-volume primary resource collection brings together a diverse range of texts on the various forms of transport used by tourists, the destinations they visited, the role of entertainments and accommodation and how these affected the way that tourism evolved over two centuries. Volume 2: Spa Tourism This volume traces the development of the spa from modest arrangements that emerged in the early modern period, to the large, thriving spa towns that existed in the nineteenth century. Documents show how spas evolved as well as the treatments they offered. Specific case studies of key spas - Bath, Tunbridge Wells and Cheltenham - are used to illustrate this process. Bath's popularity as a tourist destination grew throughout the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century it was one of the most popular destinations in Britain. Royal Tunbridge Wells was its greatest rival, and both towns benefited from the patronage of celebrated dandy, Beau Nash. Cheltenham's fashionable status was ensured by a visit from George III and his court in 1788.