This beautiful book visits twenty-eight richly atmospheric sites and tells the mythological stories associated with them.Woven into these landscapes are tales of love and betrayal, greed and courage, passion and revenge, featuring the famous characters of Celtic lore, such as Cú Chulainn, the children of Lír and Queen Maeve.The historical and archaeological facts and the folk traditions of each ancient site are explored. Some are famous, such as Tara and Newgrange; others a...

Known for speaking with the birds, for professing poverty, receiving the stigmata and for initiating the Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi is one of the most radical and inspiring figures in Christianity.In this outstanding and celebrated biography, the distinguished medievalist Jacques Le Goff paints a fascinating picture of the life of Francis of Assisi. Locating Francis in the feudal world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and exploring the social and political changes t...

Heroes and Marvels of the Middle Ages is a history like no other: it is a history of the imagination, presented through two celebrated groups of the period. One group consists of heroes: Charlemagne, El Cid, King Arthur, Orlando, Pope Joan, Melusine, Merlin the Wizard, and also the fox and the unicorn. The other is the miraculous, represented here by three forms of power that dominated medieval society: the cathedral, the castle and the cloister.This imaginative history is ...

Is there a sharp dividing line that separates Europe into "East" and "West"?This volume brings together prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, France, Poland, and Russia to examine the evolution of the concept of Europe in the two centuries between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Inspired by the ideas of Martin Malia, the contributors take a flexible view of the "cultural gradient"-the emergence, interaction, and reception of ideas across Eur...

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, ...

Take a trip through the rich folklore of Ireland in this enchanting volume from author James Stephens. Fairy kings, femmes fatales, bewitched animals, epic feuds -- these action-packed stories traverse a broad spectrum of themes and settings. Folklore fans and readers interested in Gaelic and Celtic culture will appreciate this collection.

Hannah Arendt’s definitive work on totalitarianism—an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history.A cornerstone of modern political philosophy, The Origins of Totalitarianism has become essential reading as we grapple with the rise of autocrats and tyrannical thought across the globe.The book begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European col...

“Marvelously entertaining, exciting and informative.” —Guardian“An engaging and accessible history.” —New York Review of BooksThis group biography is “an exhilarating page-turner” and “outstanding critical introduction” to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt School, and the great 20th-century thinkers who created it (Washington Post).In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and in...

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the len...

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

Bringing together scholars from Europe, America, and Australia, this volume explores the more fantastic elements of popular religious belief: ghosts, werewolves, spiritualism, animism, and of course, witchcraft. These traditional religious beliefs and practices are frequently treated as marginal in more synthetic studies of witchcraft and popular religion, yet Protestants and Catholics alike saw ghosts, imps, werewolves, and other supernatural entities as populating their world. Embedded w...

The late Leszek Kolakowski was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. A prominent anticommunist writer, Kolakowski was also a deeply humanistic thinker, and his meditations on society, religion, morality, and culture stand alongside his political writings as commentaries on intellectual-and everyday-life in the twentieth century.Kolakowski’s extraordinary empathy, humor, and erudition are on full display in Is God Happy?, the first collection of...