Medieval

Building on important issues highlighted by the late Philip Jones, this volume explores key aspects of the city state in late medieval and renaissance Italy, particularly the nature and quality of different types of government. It focuses on the apparently antithetical but often similar governmental forms represented by the republics and despotisms of the period. Beginning with a reprint of Jones original 1965 article, the volume then provides eighteen new essays that re-examine the issues he raised in light of modern scholarship. Taking a broad chronological and geographic approach, the collection offers a timely re-evaluation of a question of perennial interest to urban and political historians, as well as those with an interest in medieval and renaissance Italy.

Medieval Italy presented a rich array of discrete textual cultures, many of them specific to particular regions, professions, or groups of writers and readers. The essays in this collection consider how distinct habits of writing took root among specific communities in Italy between the early Middle Ages and the eve of the Renaissance.

In examining how ideological concerns helped give shape to strategies of writing and how forms of communication influenced cultural developments, these case studies assess a wide range of texts, including legal treatises, saintly biographies, rhetorical handbooks, and vernacular poetry. As a whole, the collection makes the case for combining abstract analyses such as textual theory and intellectual history with more technical specialties such as editing and codicology. Rather than approaching pre-modern Italian textuality as something uniform, Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy engages with its fascinating plurality.

Medieval Italy gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles, the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare, and the vernacular poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The texts highlight the continuities with the medieval Latin West while simultaneously emphasizing the ways in which Italy was exceptional, particularly for its cities that drove Mediterranean trade, its new communal forms of government, the impact of the papacy's temporal claims on the central peninsula, and the richly textured religious life of the mainland and its islands.

A unique feature of this volume is its incorporation of the southern part of the peninsula and Sicily—the glittering Norman court at Palermo, the multicultural emporium of the south, and the kingdoms of Frederick II—into a larger narrative of Italian history. Including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Lombard sources, the documents speak in ethnically and religiously differentiated voices, while providing wider chronological and geographical coverage than previously available.

Rich in interdisciplinary texts and organized to enable the reader to focus by specific region, topic, or period, this is a volume that will be an essential resource for anyone with a professional or private interest in the history, religion, literature, politics, and built environment of Italy from ca. 1000 to 1400.

Rose Williams skillfully leads the reader through the maze of power plays and the gradual rise of sovereign states that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Readers will appreciate Williams engaging style and her ability to synthesize succinctly this busy period of history. Recognizing the symbiotic relationship between literature and the era in which it was produced, From Rome to Reformation: Early European History for the New Millennium provides a comprehensive overview of the interconnecting historical events, literary figures, and intellectual developments in European history and its Latin literature. This is a perfect companion text for courses in the humanities, western civilization, and Latin.

Special Features

* Overview of the history of ideas developed in western civilization
* Assessment of the critical events in early European history
* Presentation of the key historical and literary figures of early Europe
* Timeline of European history from the fifth century to the eighteenth
* Notes section for Latin and other special terms employed in the text
* Illustrations enhance the text

For over 30 years Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers has produced the highest quality Latin and ancient Greek books. From Dr. Seuss books in Latin to Plato's Apology, Bolchazy-Carducci's titles help readers learn about ancient Rome and Greece; the Latin and ancient Greek languages are alive and well with titles like Cicero's De Amicitia and Kaegi's Greek Grammar. We also feature a line of contemporary eastern European and WWII books.

Some of the areas we publish in include:

Selections From The Aeneid
Latin Grammar & Pronunciation
Greek Grammar & Pronunciation
Texts Supporting Wheelock's Latin
Classical author workbooks: Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Cicero
Vocabulary Cards For AP Selections: Vergil, Ovid, Catullus, Horace
Greek Mythology
Greek Lexicon
Slovak Culture And History

The rise and fall of the Venetian empire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty. In City of Fortune, Roger Crowley, acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author of Empires of the Sea, applies his narrative skill to chronicling the astounding five-hundred-year voyage of Venice to the pinnacle of power.
 
Tracing the full arc of the Venetian imperial saga for the first time, City of Fortune is framed around two of the great collisions of world history: the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, which culminated in the sacking of Constantinople and the carve-up of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1499–1503, which saw the Ottoman Turks supplant the Venetians as the preeminent naval power in the Mediterranean. In between were three centuries of Venetian maritime dominance—years of plunder and plague, conquest and piracy—during which a tiny city of “lagoon dwellers” grew into the richest place on earth.
 
Drawing on firsthand accounts of pitched sea battles, skillful negotiations, and diplomatic maneuvers, Crowley paints a vivid picture of this avaricious, enterprising people and the bountiful lands that came under their dominion. Defiant of emperors, indifferent to popes, the Venetians saw themselves as reluctant freebooters, compelled to take to the open seas “because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade.” From the opening of the spice routes to the clash between Christianity and Islam, Venice played a leading role in the defining conflicts of its time—the reverberations of which are still being felt today. Only an author with Roger Crowley’s deep knowledge of post-Crusade history could put these iconic events into their proper context.
 
Epic in scope, magisterial in its understanding of the period, City of Fortune is narrative history at its most engrossing.

In the year 1495, Charles VIII was the youthful King of France, the most powerful state in medieval Europe. A dreamer who saw himself as the saviour of Christian Europe, he believed he could roll back the ever-spreading tide of Ottoman Turkish conquest. As a base for his crusade he was determined to seize southern Italy. In a lightning campaign he used France's modern army to sweep through Italy, his mobile field artillery train smashing into dust the tall towers of Italy's medieval castles. The Italian states rallied and at Fornovo their alliance, the League of Venice, fought Charles' army to a standstill.