This section presents Part I of The Malleus Maleficarum, one of the best-known treatises dealing with the problem of what to do with witches, written in 1487 by a Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Institoris. Part I is addressed to fellow theologians, and is devoted to showing that the conspiratorial pact between workers of harmful magic and evil spirits is no fantasy but a present reality, and that the cause of the increasing numbers of witches lies in the sexual relations between women and evil spirits. It is thus an extended essay in demonology rather than a handbook.

In this introduction, translator P.G. Maxwell-Stuart sets out the key themes and features of the three distinct parts of The Malleus Maleficarum, discussing he intellectual ambience of the Malleus, magic in the fifteenth century, and inquisitors Heinrich Institoris and Jakob Sprenger. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the later history of the Malleus, and it's various printings and translations into German, French, English, and Italian.

This section presents Part IIII of The Malleus Maleficarum, one of the best-known treatises dealing with the problem of what to do with witches, written in 1487 by a Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Institoris. Part III is indeed more like a manual. Addressed to judges both ecclesiastical and secular, it covers a large number of technical points anent the arrest, examination, and sentencing of workers of harmful magic, offering examples of the appropriate formulae to be used in whatever circumstance the examining and sentencing judge might fi nd himself. This part could, in fact, almost be detached from the rest of the treatise without affecting the other two.

This chapter presents the concepts discussed in this book, which is a collection of scholarly essays related to John Mandeville's Travels by scholars in England and France who produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. The first part of the book provides accounts of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travels of the Travels' variable text in its English or 'Insular' versions, along with some account of the epistemological considerations that accompanied its travel to the more pragmatic economic and colonial concerns of the Tudor and Jacobean periods. The second examines the historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England, Mandevillian geography, and the importance of medieval culture to the understanding of a European Renaissance. The last section is concerned with the invented medium of the commercial theatre.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a record of, and tribute to, the beauties and pleasures of chivalric life. Gawain tells the story of a fearsome green-skinned knight who rides into King Arthur's court, and issues a challenge: will one of them strike a blow at him with his axe, and agree to receive a return blow in a year's time? Chivalry is presented throughout as offering an attractive front to the world with nothing solid underpinning it. In life as well as in literature, chivalry emphasises the importance of polite and honourable behaviour and speech, lavish display, and other external manifestations. The confessions in the last part of the poem point to a fundamental difference between the secular chivalric and the Christian ethical systems. The games and the glamour end in Morgan, and the code of honour leaves Gawain, the pearl of knights, a broken man.

Royal jurisdiction through the common law increased exponentially during the period 1215-1381. Participation in the royal courts was therefore an important way in which people became increasingly familiar with the processes of law. A mixture of royal policy, experience of litigation and feedback from lawyers and litigants shaped the development of the royal courts. The effects of changes are assessed by four criteria: availability, actionability, accountability and accessibility. The chapter first considers the availability of royal justice and provides the reader with a snapshot of the judicial system. Accountability was an important feature of the Crown's policy towards the administration of justice and one that had political and financial implications as well as purely legal ones. The Crown's role in the prosecution of individuals was not restricted to the identification of offenders through the use of local juries.

After c.1970 few medieval economic and social historians approaching the topic of the medieval peasantry could do so without including some discussion of the demography of their object of investigation. The introduction of subtle and involved demographic technique into the research of medievalists was dependent upon the development of the subject of demography and of an overlap between historians and demographers. J.C. Russell, one of the most important exponents of historical demography in the middle decades of the twentieth century, had begun to consider the sources and approaches to the population history of the middle ages in the 1920s and 1930s while teaching relevant university courses in New Mexico. Russell's own discussion of medieval demography, while certainly not confined to the sources of the social elites in this period, offers little comment on the rural population per se or the demography of the medieval English peasantry in particular.

Evidence suggests that Mandeville's Travels was written between 1351 (the date of completion of Jean Le Long's translations) and March 1357 (the date of the signing of the treaty between England and France after the battle of Poitiers). This chapter presents a summary of the evidence concerning the dissemination and readership of Mandeville's Travels in England before the appearance of Pynson's print c. 1496. Mandeville's Travels, written while hostilities still plagued the countryside, was sent to Paris, the major book-producing centre of Europe, possibly by the author anonymously very early on, and by c 1360 was part of the staple of the Parisian stationers. Three other Latin manuscripts of Travels are recorded in the book- lists of the Cluniac priory of Monks Bretton, Yorkshire, the Premonstratensian house at Titchfield, Hampshire, and the Augustinian abbey at Leicester. The chapter shows that Travels was known and read by gentry and clergy alike.

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The part identifies features of the relevant historiography that often relate to or respond to the major shifts in our understanding of the medieval peasantry. Some of these developments reflect an intensification or a deepening of research in relation to more general theories regarding the functioning of medieval rural society and economy. Much of the discussion of medieval peasant culture has emerged in relation to discussion of peasant agency, be that in terms of politics and the political engagement of the peasantry, in or beyond the manor, or in commercial exchanges involving peasants, as producers and consumers. Historical investigation of themes relevant to our understanding of the medieval peasantry has been conducted by historians working, for the greater part, in other areas and often responding to other agendas.

Pearl is a religious dream-vision in which the dream is largely taken up by dialogue between the narrator or dreamer, as a figure in his dream, and a woman who is a fount of divine wisdom. It does not engage significantly with the fourteenth century. Its interest lies rather in relating Christian doctrine to universal life-experience, and particularly in the problem that some of the basic tenets of that doctrine fly in the face of basic human instincts and attitudes. The narrative of Pearl is multi-layered, with the poet creating a dreamer-figure separate from himself whose attitudes differ significantly before, in, and after his dream. If the dreamer is to be taken as a representative figure for all humanity then the poem demonstrates that the ways of God can never be justified to men, for the distance between God and man is too great to be bridged.