History : Europe

A pioneering study of the Alamanni, one of the so-called barbarian tribes raiding the Roman Empire in the third century AD. John Drinkwater uses new archaeological and historical findings to trace their complex, and sometime surprising, relationship with the world of imperial Rome. - ;The Alamanni and Rome focuses upon the end of the Roman Empire. From the third century AD, barbarians attacked and then overran the west. Some - Goths, Franks, Saxons - are well known, others less so. The latter include the Alamanni, despite the fact that their name is found in the French ('Allemagne') and Spanish ('Alemania') for 'Germany'. This pioneering study, the first in English, uses new historical and archaeological findings to reconstruct the origins of the. Alamanni, their settlements, their politics, and their society, and to establish the nature of their relationship with Rome. John Drinkwater discovers the cause of their modern elusiveness in their high level of dependence on the Empire. Far from being dangerous invaders, they were often the prey of emperors. intent on acquiring military reputations. When much of the western Empire fell to the Franks, so did the Alamanni, without ever having produced their own 'successor kingdom'. - ;Drinkwater's book immediately takes its place as one of the most focused and detailed analyses of the Alamanni in existence, certainly the best available in English. - Bryn Mawr Classical Review more...

Price: $125.00

What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe’s social and economic ills. Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, Tara Nummedal shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe. more...

Price: $37.50

An intellectual biography of Alcuin, the most prominent Anglo-Saxon scholar at the court of Charlemagne. It examines his early years in Northumbria and his time at the Carolingian court, reassessing the chronology of Alcuin's career and writings, and the significance of his large output. more...

Price: $199.00

"Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune" by A. D. Crake is a classic work of literature that can be enjoyed by all. Download "Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune" and enjoy another quality Digireads.com publication. more...

Price: $9.99

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were united in a 'brutal friendship' Yet each nation treated the Jews quite differently. Using this remarkable story the book unravels the motives behind both Nazism and Fascism in an attempt to answer: Why? more...

Price: $35.95