Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, 2000, 240 p., 7 ill. n.b., rel. -

What is a court? Is it synonymous with a capital? Are both dependent on the presence (or absence) of a ruler and the machinery of government and administration? Such issues are problematic, and the attempt to define the relationship between court and region is a central theme in the essays collected here. They employ a variety of disciplines, archaeology, art history, literature and history, to examine the phenomenon of the court and its relationship with the immediate hinterland or more distant areas, in places as far apart as the Carolingian Empire and Lancastrian Normandy, London, York and Prague, and the timeframe extends from the beginning of the eighth century to the later years of the fifteenth. The authors teach at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.