In Egypt's Thousand Days of Revolution, author Alexander Murray provides a vivid and fascinating eyewitness account of Egyptian life in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. A Scotsman and confirmed Egyptophile, Murray first arrived in Cairo just weeks before the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and has returned to the country for many extended visits since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In his remarkable book - part travel guide, part personal memoir, part sociopolitical commentary - the au...

The studies collected here cover a period of about 33 years, from 1986 to 2019, and represent a sustained effort to understand the institutions of the Merovingian kingdom and its history. There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in the dark colours of barbarism or to treat it with reference to personal relationships and archaic institutions. The present volume, instead, recognizes the Merovingian world not as an archaic, primitive intrusion on the Mediterranean c...

Alexander Murray has long had an intellectual interest in the history of religion - struggling between his inbuilt anti-clericism and his pronounced monastic leanings. The five essays in Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church take on this dialectic, addressing the difficult relationship between private conscience and public authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In any organization, political, military, commercial, or religious, the relationship of conscience...

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide – for that is what it is– have earned this unusual treatment? In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condem...

**In this New York Times bestselling memoir, Malala Yousafzai—the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—inspires young readers with her stunning story of resilience and power.I Am Malala. This is my story.**Malala Yousafzai was only ten years old when the Taliban took control of her region. They said music was a crime. They said women weren't allowed to go to the market. They said girls couldn't go to school.Raised in a once-peaceful area of Pakistan tra...

"What makes this work so exciting is not simply its content . . . but its revolutionary challenge to . . . Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." — NewsweekJohn Boswell's National Book Award–winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members—among them priests, bishops, and even saints—when it ...

The acclaimed philosopher and author of Homo Sacer contemplates the possibility of true human freedom through a deep analysis of monastic stricture.What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Giorgio Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the phenomenon ...

Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacu...

Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Catholic priest in the early thirteeth century, is considered to be one of the great Christian thinkers who had, and who still has, a profound influence on Western thought. He was a controversial figure who was exposed and engaged in conflict. This Very Short Introduction looks at Aquinas in a historical context, and explores the Church and culture into which Aquinas was born. It considers Aquinas as philosopher, and looks at the relationship between phi...

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process which effectively overthrew all justicfication for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as ...

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of ...

A SPECTATOR AND SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK'Timely and beautifully written' Sunday Times'Phenomenal. An extraordinary insight into a country barely known - and often feared - by the West' VogueWelcome to Tehran, a city where survival depends on a network of subterfuge. Here is a place where mullahs visit prostitutes, drug kin...