Intended for Western Civilization surveys or courses on Early or Modern Europe, they incorporate the most significant historical scholarship of the past fifty years. Conventional political history is presented in three forms: in the narrative wherever appropriate, in boxed inserts, and in the chronologies which open each chapter. Both authors frequently relate past history to present events and problems. The second volume contains extensive coverage of the United States. Both volumes contain maps, photos, and annotated bibliographies broken out in historical time periods and arranged topically within the periods.

Life and Society in the West: Antiquity and the Middle Ages

History

Bouchard, Constance Brittain

World

Harcourt College Pub.

Knights: In History and Legend

Written by an international team of historians and scholars with specialized knowledge of the medieval era and illustrated with sumptuous images ranging from manuscript illuminations and PreRaphaelite paintings to photographs of authentic armor, swords, and castles, plus maps and a timeline, this book is at once a detailed history of knights and a chronicle of their cultural creations and legacy. 
This vividly written and lavishly illustrated large hardcover reference volume describes the origins of knighthood, the training and lifestyles of knights, and the vital role these warriors played in medieval military campaigns. It also explains heraldry and the various military and honorific orders of knighthood, and examines the portrayal of knights and literature and art.

Europe

Chartwell Books

In Sword, Miter, and Cloister, Constance Brittain Bouchard provides a fresh perspective on social and ecclesiastical life in the High Middle Ages. Drawing on a vast range of primary sources, she reveals the surprisingly close relationship between the nobility and reformed monasteries in Burgundy. By focusing on a region considered to be the heart of aristocratic and monastic Europe during this era, Bouchard is able to develop themes and reach conclusions that can be applied to much of Europe.

Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–1198

Cornell University Press

The twelfth century was characterized by intense spirituality as well as rapid economic development. Drawing on unprecedented research, Constance Brittain Bouchard demonstrates that the Cistercian monks of Burgundy were exemplary in both spheres. Bouchard explores the web of economic ties that linked the Cistercian monasteries with their secular neighbors, especially the knights, and reaches some surprising conclusions about Cistercian attitudes.

Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

Business & Money

Economics

"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble": Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women.
Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.

In high medieval France, men and women saw the world around them as the product of tensions between opposites. Imbued with a Christian culture in which a penniless preacher was also the King of Kings and the last were expected to be first, twelfth-century thinkers brought order to their lives through the creation of opposing categories. In a highly original work, Constance Brittain Bouchard examines this poorly understood component of twelfth-century thought, one responsible, in her view, for the fundamental strangeness of that culture to modern thinking.
Scholars have long recognized that dialectical reasoning was the basic approach to philosophical, legal, and theological matters in the high Middle Ages. Bouchard argues that this way of thinking and categorizing―which she terms a "discourse of opposites"―permeated all aspects of medieval thought. She rejects suggestions that it was the result of imprecision, and provides evidence that people of that era sought not to reconcile opposing categories but rather to maintain them.
Bouchard scrutinizes the medieval use of opposites in five broad areas: scholasticism, romance, legal disputes, conversion, and the construction of gender. Drawing on research in a series of previously unedited charters and the earliest glossa manuscripts, she demonstrates that this method of constructing reality was a constitutive element of the thought of the period.

"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted": The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

The twelfth century was characterized by intense spirituality as well as rapid economic development. Drawing on unprecedented research, Constance Brittain Bouchard demonstrates that the Cistercian monks of Burgundy were exemplary in both spheres. Bouchard explores the web of economic ties that linked the Cistercian monasteries with their secular neighbors, especially the knights, and reaches some surprising conclusions about Cistercian attitudes.

In Sword, Miter, and Cloister, Constance Brittain Bouchard provides a fresh perspective on social and ecclesiastical life in the High Middle Ages. Drawing on a vast range of primary sources, she reveals the surprisingly close relationship between the nobility and reformed monasteries in Burgundy. By focusing on a region considered to be the heart of aristocratic and monastic Europe during this era, Bouchard is able to develop themes and reach conclusions that can be applied to much of Europe.

Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198

Chosen for the Ohio Historian Award for 2002 of the Ohio Academy of History. For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed. One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies. While the general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood," not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women conceptualized and structured the family unit changed markedly over time. Focusing on the Frankish realm between the eighth and twelfth centuries, Constance Brittain Bouchard outlines the operative definitions of "family" in this period when there existed various and flexible ways by which individuals were or were not incorporated into the family group. Even in medieval patriarchal society, women of the aristocracy, who were considered outsiders by their husbands and their husbands' siblings and elders, were never completely marginalized and paradoxically represented the very essence of "family" to their male children. Bouchard also engages in the ongoing scholarly debate about the nobility around the year 1000, arguing that there was no clear point of transition from amorphous family units to agnatically structured kindred. Instead, she points out that great noble families always privileged the male line of descent, even if most did not establish father-son inheritance until the eleventh or twelfth century. Those of My Blood clarifies the complex meanings of medieval family structure and family consciousness and shows the many ways in which negotiations of power within the noble family can help explain early medieval politics.

Those of My Blood: Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia (The Middle Ages Series)

University of Pennsylvania Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bouchard, Constance Brittain. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bouchard, Constance Brittain

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bouchard, Constance Brittain. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Life and Society in the West: Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Knights: In History and Legend

Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–1198

Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble": Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted": The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198

"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble": Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

Those of My Blood: Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia (The Middle Ages Series)