The Kings Of Alba

Author : Alasdair Ross
Publisher : Birlinn Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1788853679
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Kings of Alba written by Alasdair Ross and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of 1000-1130 were crucial to the successful emergence of the medieval kingdom of the Scots. Yet this is one of the least researched periods of Scottish history. We probably now know more about the Picts than the post-1000 events that underpinned the spectacular expansion of the small kingdom which came to dominate north Britain by the 1130s. This expansion included the defeat and absorption of other significant cultural and political groups to the north and south of the core kingdom, and was accompanied by the introduction of reformed monasticism. But perhaps the most momentous process amongst all these political and cultural changes was the move towards the domination of the kingship by just one segment of the royal kindred, the sons of King Mael Coluim mac Donnchada's second marriage to Queen Margaret. The story of how these sons managed to achieve political supremacy through machination, murder and mutilation runs like an unsavoury thread throughout this book. The book also investigates the building blocks from which the kingdom was constructed and the various processes which eventually allowed the kings of the different peoples of north Britain to describe themselves as Rex scottorum. It is a hugely rewarding voyage of discovery for anyone interested in the formation of the kingdom of the Scots.

Author : Alex Woolf
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748628215
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 written by Alex Woolf and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 780s northern Britain was dominated by two great kingdoms; Pictavia, centred in north-eastern Scotland and Northumbria which straddled the modern Anglo-Scottish border. Within a hundred years both of these kingdoms had been thrown into chaos by the onslaught of the Vikings and within two hundred years they had become distant memories. This book charts the transformation of the political landscape of northern Britain between the eighth and the eleventh centuries. Central to this narrative is the mysterious disappearance of the Picts and their language and the sudden rise to prominence of the Gaelic-speaking Scots who would replace them as the rulers of the North. From Pictland to Alba uses fragmentary sources which survive from this darkest period in Scottish history to guide the reader past the pitfalls which beset the unwary traveller in these dangerous times. Important sources are presented in full and their value as evidence is thoroughly explored and evaluated.

Author : Dorothy Dunnett
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307762343
Total Pages : 1219 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book King Hereafter written by Dorothy Dunnett and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 1219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Back in print by popular demand--"A stunning revelation of the historical Macbeth, harsh and brutal and eloquent." --Washington Post Book World. With the same meticulous scholarship and narrative legerdemain she brought to her hugely popular Lymond Chronicles, our foremost historical novelist travels further into the past. In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland. Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue. He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth. Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself. She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable--and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

Author : Thomas Henry Dyer
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 584 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The History of the Kings of Rome written by Thomas Henry Dyer and published by . This book was released on 1868 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Simon Taylor
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500-1297 written by Simon Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten essays from a February 1999 conference in St. Andrews, Scotland, celebrate the scholar's career. Their topics include evidence of a lost Pictish source in the Historia Regum Anglorum of Symeon of Durham, the thriving of Dalriada, the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, recovering the full text of Ve

Author : J.M.P. Calise
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313017115
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pictish Sourcebook written by J.M.P. Calise and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-08-30 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited and translated Medieval texts related to the Picts and Dark Age Scotland have been compiled for the first time in this one volume collection. Recorded texts include Pictish Origin Legends written in Medieval Irish and Pictish and Scottish Regnal Lists, many of which have never previously been edited. Students and scholars will also find appendices containing lists, tables, and charts of supplemental information related to the Picts. Dictionaries of 500 personal, place, and population names associated with the Picts provide further innovative analysis of these texts. Calise has compiled a useful tool which allows scholars and students to compare and contrast the content of these texts in one handy reference book. There are no written documents attributable to the Picts, leaving their history to be created mainly by non-Picts. This refence work is an attempt to find historical truths within the mythological with the use of the available Medieval documentary sources.

Author : Neil McGuigan
Publisher : Birlinn Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1788851447
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Máel Coluim III, 'Canmore' written by Neil McGuigan and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Saltire Society History Book of the Year The legendary Scottish king Máel Coluim III, also known as 'Malcolm Canmore', is often held to epitomise Scotland's 'ancient Gaelic kings'. But Máel Coluim and his dynasty were in fact newcomers, and their legitimacy and status were far from secure at the beginning of his rule. Máel Coluim's long reign from 1058 until 1093 coincided with the Norman Conquest of England, a revolutionary event that presented great opportunities and terrible dangers. Although his interventions in post-Conquest England eventually cost him his life, the book argues that they were crucial to his success as both king and dynasty-builder, creating internal stability and facilitating the takeover of Strathclyde and Lothian. As a result, Máel Coluim left to his successors a territory that stretched far to the south of the kingship's heartland north of the Forth, similar to the Scotland we know today. The book explores the wider political and cultural world in which Máel Coluim lived, guiding the reader through the pitfalls and possibilities offered by the sources that mediate access to that world. Our reliance on so few texts means that the eleventh century poses problems that historians of later eras can avoid. Nevertheless Scotland in Máel Coluim's time generated unprecedented levels of attention abroad and more vernacular literary output than at any time prior to the Stewart era.

Author : John W. M. Bannerman
Publisher : Birlinn Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1907909370
Total Pages : 513 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kinship, Church and Culture written by John W. M. Bannerman and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Bannerman (1932-2008) saw the history of Scotland from a Gaelic perspective, and his outstanding scholarship made that perspective impossible to ignore. As a historian, his natural home was the era between the Romans and the twelfth century when the Scottish kingdom first began to take shape, but he also wrote extensively on the MacDonald Lordship of the Isles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while his work on the Beatons, the notable Gaelic medical kindred, reached into the early eighteenth century. Across this long millennium, Bannerman ranged and wrote with authority and insight on what he termed the 'kin-based society', with special emphasis upon its church and culture, and its relationship with Ireland. This collection opens with Bannerman's ground-breaking and hugely influential edition and discussion of Senchus fer nAlban ('The History of the Men of Scotland'), which featured in his Studies in the History of Dalriada (1974), now long out of print. To this have been added all of his published essays, plus an essay-length study of the Lordship of the Isles which first featured as an appendix in Late Medieval Monumental Sculpture in the West Highlands (1977). The book will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the Gaelic dimension to Scotland's past and present.

Author : Henry Kamen
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300102833
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Duke of Alba written by Henry Kamen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing biography that attempts to fathom the motivations of an infamous sixteenth-century Spanish general Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, the third duke of Alba (1507-82), is known to history as "the butcher of Flanders." The general who carried out Philip II's repressive policies in the Netherlands, he was responsible for the massacre of thousands of men, women, and children, considering it better to lay waste an entire country than leave it in the hands of heretics. Alba came to represent for contemporaries as well as for future generations the unacceptable face of Spanish imperialism. In this intriguing re-evaluation, Henry Kamen narrates the duke's personal history, looking beyond the conventional image to reveal motives and to explain rather than simply to condemn. Kamen examines the early years of Alba's life, his travels over the whole of Europe, and the complex military and political career that made him Spain's leading general of the imperial age. Drawing on the duke's rich and expressive surviving correspondence, Kamen explores Alba's beliefs and considers his infamous actions within the contexts of his time and of the monarchs--Emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain--whom he served.

Author : John Ashton Cannon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0199559228
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Kings & Queens of Britain written by John Ashton Cannon and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: