Fiefs and Vassals has revolutionized thinking of the Middle Ages. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism and overturns centuries of misconceptions about the nature of medieval social relations.

This volume offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the history of a complex and varied body of ideas over a period of more than a thousand years. A work of both synthesis and assessment, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought presents the results of several decades of critical scholarship in the field, and reflects in its breadth of enquiry precisely that diversity of ..

In this text the author provides an account of the centuries during which Europe changed from being an abstract geographical expression into a new, culturally coherent entity. It examines how the social, economic and cultural structures of antiquity were replaced by their medieval equivalents.

A wave of internal conquest, settlement and economic growth in Europe during High Middle Ages transformed it from a world of small separate communities into a network of powerful kingdoms. This book shows how Europe was itself a product of colonization, as much as it was later a colonizer, and what this did to shape the continent and the world.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the city of Florence experienced the most creative period in her entire history. This book offers an analysis of that community, focusing on the years 1380-1450 in an examination of the city's physical character, its economic and social structure and developments, and its political and religious life.