Examines European life between the years 1000 and 1300 focusing on the growth of cities, the development of a money-based economy, and the emergence of a Europe newly unified by a shared religion and increased trade.

Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century masterpiece The Canterbury Tales is such a rollicking good read that you'll forget many critics and scholars also regard it as one of the most important literary works in English. A group of pilgrims are traveling together to visit a holy shrine at the Canterbury Cathedral. Along the way, they decide to hold a storytelling contest to pass the time, with the winner to be awarded a lavish feast on the

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A collection of short one-person plays featuring characters, between ten and fifteen years old, who live in or near a thirteenth-century English manor.

For nearly two centuries, the Knights Templar was the most powerful order in the medieval world. Today, the group's legacy is played out in an array of Hollywood blockbusters and numerous works of popular literature. Despite the Knights' long reign of power, the order experienced a sudden collapse in the early fourtheenth century when certain members stood accused of unspeakable crimes and were subsequently tortured and killed. Interviews some of...

Discusses how medieval people viewed the world before it was widely understood and accepted that the world is round and rotates around the sun.

This book is a look at the least-appreciated yet profoundly important period of European history: the so-called Dark Ages. The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only way of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But...

A Polish family in the Middle Ages guards a great secret treasure and a boy's memory of an earlier trumpeter of Krakow makes it possible for him to save his father.