Finance and the Crusades

Finance and the Crusades
Author: Daniel Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000469875

This book investigates the financial aspects of crusading in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Taking the kingdom of England as a case study, it explores a variety of themes, such as how much crusades cost, how they were financed, how funds were transferred to the East and how crusaders fared financially after their return. Its fundamental argument, in contrast with current historiography, is that it was the "private" fundraising of individuals – not the "public" fundraising of the Crown and the Church – that constituted the life-blood of the crusade movement in the period under consideration. Indeed, it is likely that the crusades were only able to remain central to the religious and political life of England, and indeed western Christendom, because participants, and those in their connection, continued to be willing to sacrifice their own financial wellbeing for the interests of the Holy Land.

The King's Jews

The King's Jews
Author: Robin R. Mundill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-06-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1441138870

In July 1290, Edward I issued writs to the Sheriffs of the English counties ordering them to enforce a decree to expel all Jews from England before All Saints' Day of that year. England became the first country to expel a Jewish minority from its borders. They were allowed to take their portable property but their houses were confiscated by the king. In a highly readable account, Robin Mundill considers the Jews of medieval England as victims of violence (notably the massacre of Shabbat haGadol when York's Jewish community perished at Clifford's Tower) and as a people apart, isolated amidst a hostile environment. The origins of the business world are considered including the fact that the medieval English Jew perfected modern business methods many centuries before its recognised time. What emerges is a picture of a lost society which had much to contribute and yet was turned away in 1290.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess
Author: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-10-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812297504

In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

Extreme Weather

Extreme Weather
Author: Robert K. Doe
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 111894996X

This book is about weather extremes in the United Kingdom. It presents fascinating and detailed insights into tornadoes (supercell and non-supercell tornadoes, historical and contemporary case studies, frequency and spatial distributions, and unique data on extreme events); thunderstorms (epic event analysis and observing); hailstorms (intensity, distributions and frequency of high magnitude events); lightning (lightning as a hazard, impacts and injuries); ball lightning (definitions, impacts and case studies); flooding (historical and contemporary analysis, extreme rainfall and flash flooding); snowfalls (heavy snowfall days and events). It also looks at researching weather extremes, provides guidance on performing post-storm site investigations and details what is involved in severe weather forecasting. It is written by members, directors and past and present Heads of the research group the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO). With fifteen chapters thematically arranged, and data appendix including a new tornado map of the U.K., this book presents a wealth of information on meteorological extremes. This volume is aimed primarily at researchers in the field of meteorology and climatology, but will also be of interest to advanced undergraduate students taking relevant courses in this area.