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  Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe, 1080-1350

  Tzafrir Barzilay, Eyal Levinson, and Elisheva Baumgarten

  Designed to introduce students to the everyday lives of the Jews who lived in the German Empire, northern France, and England from the 11th to the mid-14th centuries, the volume consists of translations of primary sources written by or about medieval Jews. Each source is accompanied by an introduction that provides historical context. Through the sources, students can become familiar with the spaces that Jews frequented, their daily practices and rituals, and their thinking. The subject matter ranges from culinary preferences and even details of sexual lives, to garments, objects, and communal buildings. The documents testify to how Jews enacted their Sabbath and holidays, celebrated their weddings, births and other lifecycle events, and mourned their dead. Some of the sources focus on the relationships they had with their Christian neighbors, the local authorities, and the Church, while others shed light on their economic activities and professions.

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  Henry VII's London in the Great Chronicle

  Julia Boffey

  This modernized extract from The Great Chronicle of London covers the reign of England’s first Tudor king, Henry VII (1485-1509). It gives an eye-witness account of events in London, and of news from elsewhere, from the viewpoint of a well-to- do citizen who was closely involved in civic administration. It describes many notable public events: riots and uprisings, executions, coronations, royal marriages and funerals, and ceremonial activities involving the mayor and aldermen. Its year by year entries also cover matters like the weather, the cost of living, taxes, and the effects of building work undertaken in the city. Although its compiler worked to a scheme common to other London chronicles from the period, he was ready to express his own views on a number of matters, and wrote with keen observation and occasional wit.

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  Medieval Latin Liturgy in English Translation

  Matthew Cheung Salisbury

  In this volume, readers experience, in English translation, the colorful and varied textual fabric of the most important literary and creative repertory of the Middle Ages: the Latin Liturgy.

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  John Stone's Chronicle: Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, 1417–1472

  Meriel Connor

  It is the purpose of this small book to offer to the reader selections from Stone's modest compilation of the internal life of his own monastic community—obituaries of monks, the celebration of the liturgy, even the weather—set against the wider events of the tumultuous fifteenth century in England.

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  Medieval Notaries and Their Acts: The 1327–1328 Register of Jean Holanie

  Kathryn L. Reyerson and Debra A. Salata

  This book explores the beginnings of the continental European notarial tradition, acquainting readers with the format of notarial documents, the books containing notarial acts, and with the variety of notarial acts.

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  Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe: Sisters and Patrons of the Cistercian Reform

  Constance A H Berman

  A selection of documents, translated primarily from medieval Latin but occasionally from Old French, that shows how religious women and their patrons managed resources to make monastic communities - particularly a variety of Cistercian communities - work. The records help us reconstruct how nuns and abbesses of Cistercian communities in the thirteenth century organized and kept records, managed their properties, responded to attempts at usurpation, and balanced their lives between devotional practices, which were part of their cloistered world, and family and social responsibilities beyond the convent walls.

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  A Slice of Life: Selected Documents of Medieval English Peasant Experience

  Edwin Brezette DeWindt

  "Since the audience for this text is assumed to be primarily students of medieval history, nothing from a specifically literary text has been included. Further, since archaeology deals in artifacts and other physical remains, it is impractical to supply material from that discipline. Therefore, only material from record sources is provided . . . These are the only written materials that permit some measure of personalized contact with specific men and women from the past, so this gives them a special importance." - from the Introduction

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  Sources for the History of Medicine in Late Medieval England

  Carole Rawcliffe

  The material contained here derives from a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, chosen to give some idea of the rich diversity of evidence available to the historian of English medicine and its place in society during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Latin and French have been translated into modern English, while vernacular texts have been slightly modified, and obsolete or difficult words explained. Middle English has otherwise been retained to give the past an authentic voice and to emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between the experience of modern readers and that of the inhabitants of late medieval England

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  Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London

  Shannon McSheffrey

  Depositions (or testimony) in marriage cases brought before fifteenth-century English church courts reveal the attitudes and feelings of medieval people towards the marital bond.