In the middle ages romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons - to celebrate and justify war, chivalric ideaologies and to rationalize power structures. The essays in this volume consider individual romances, groups of writings and the genre, explaining e…
"Eleventh-century England suffered two devastating conquests, each bringing the rule of a foreign king and the imposition of a new regime. Yet only the second event, the Norman Conquest of 1066, has been credited with the impact and influence of a permanent transformation. Half …
Richard II (1377-99) came to the throne as a child, following the long, domineering, martial reign of his grandfather Edward III. He suffered from the disastrous combination of a most exalted sense of his own power and an inability to impress that power on those closest to the t…