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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
Nancy Marie Brown · 313 pages
Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed past the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, few believed that the details of Gudrid's story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scienti
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580
Eamon Duffy · 654 pages
This important and provocative book offers a fundamental challenge to much that has been written about the pre-Reformation church. Eamon Duffy recreates fifteenth-century English lay people's experience of religion, revealing the richness and complexity of the Catholicism by which men and women structured their experience of the world and their hopes within and beyond it. He then tells the powerf
The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance
Jim Al-Khalili · 336 pages
The Last Days of Richard III
John Ashdown-Hill · 190 pages
This book contains details about what Richard III did in his last five months, what happened to his body, and how his DNA was found in Canada. This book explores these events from the standpoint of Richard himself and his contemporaries. By deliberately avoiding the hindsight knowledge that he will lose the Battle of Bosworth Field, this book presents a new Richard - not a passive victim, awaiting
How the Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill · 246 pages
From the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne - the "dark ages" - learning, scholarship, and culture disappeared from the European continent. The great heritage of western civilization - from the Greek and Roman classics to Jewish and Christian works - would have been utterly lost were it not for the holy men and women of unconquered Ireland. In this delightful and illuminating look into a cru
The Women of the Cousins' War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King's Mother
Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin, Michael K. Jones · 342 pages
A non-fiction companion to The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Lady of the Rivers. Philippa Gregory and two historians, leading experts in their field, tell the extraordinary 'true' stories of the lives of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels. With a forew
The Stormin' Normans
Terry Deary
Fascinating facts about big bad Bill the Conqueror and his bully-boys who battled at Hastings. Everyone knows about 1066, and how William the Conqueror's men scored a bull's eye at the Battle of Hastings. Or rather a King's eye. But why did William like conquering so much? Were the Normans abnormal? Probably not -- King Harold and his men were just as fond of cutting off bits of people they didn't
Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China
John Man · 389 pages
Jerusalem: The Biography
Simon Sebag Montefiore · 672 pages
Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and
A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-AD 1603
Simon Schama · 356 pages
'The British Wars' is a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and strata of British life, faith and thought from 1603 to 1776. It explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change.
Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe
Peter Heather · 734 pages
"Here is a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid nar
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade
James Reston Jr. · 312 pages
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
Maria Rosa Menocal · 315 pages
A brilliant and fascinating portrait of medieval Spain explores the golden age when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance. of photos. 3 maps.
Blood Sisters: The Women Behind The War Of The Roses
Sarah Gristwood · 408 pages
"In Pembroke Castle, on 28 January 1457, the 13-year-old Margaret Beaufort gave birth to a son she named Henry. Her husband was already dead; her sufferings in childbirth were grave... England was in the grip of civil war - the War of the Roses. Known to contemporaries as 'The Cousins War', beyond the fields of battle raged a family feud, a violent and emotional domestic drama. For the noble women
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam
Bernard Lewis · 176 pages
The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III’s Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds
Michael K. Jones, Philippa Langley
This is the first full-length book about the discovery of Richard III's remains by the person who led the archeology team and the historian whose book spurred her on. The mystery of who Richard III really was has fascinated historians, readers and audiences familiar with Shakespeare's dastardly portrait of a hunchback monster of royalty for centuries. Earlier this year, the remains of a man with a
The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc
Nancy Goldstone
Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North
'Hmd bn fDln, Ahmad ibn Fadlan · 256 pages
"In 922 AD, an Arab envoy from Baghdad named Ibn Fadlan encountered a party of Viking traders on the upper reaches of the Volga River. In his subsequent report on his mission he gave a meticulous and astonishingly objective description of Viking customs, dress, table manners, religion and sexual practices, as well as the only eyewitness account ever written of a Viking ship cremation. Between the
Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
Colin Wells · 368 pages
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
Ross E. Dunn, Ibn Battuta · 357 pages
Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and
Blood & Roses: the Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses
Helen Castor · 426 pages
The Wars of the Roses turned England upside down between the years of 1455 and 1485. Yet, as they navigated their disintegrating world, a Norfolk family called the Pastons were writing letters--about politics, business, shopping, love--and about each other. Extraordinarily, these letters have survived. Drawing on these remarkable letters, Castor has written an intimate and compelling family biogra
The New Concise History of the Crusades
Thomas F. Madden · 259 pages
"How have the crusades contributed to Islamist rage and terrorism today? Were the crusades the Christian equivalent of modern jihad? In this sweeping yet crisp history, Thomas Madden offers a narrative of the crusades and their contemporary relevance." "Placing all the major crusades within their medieval social, economic, religious, and intellectual environments, Madden explores the uniquely medi