An illustrated history of medieval knighthood traces the origins of chivalry and its development into a romantic tradition and the effect of chivalric ideas on society, religion, and literature.

The destruction of the French army at Crécy in 1346 and the subsequent siege and capture of Calais marked a new era in European history. This book is about knighthood, battle tactics and grand strategy, and also about fashion, literature and the privates lives of everyone from queens to freebooters.

"Barber traces the history of the stories surrounding the Holy Grail, beginning with Chretien de Troyes, who in the twelfth century first imagined the famous scene in which a mysterious golden vessel adorned with jewels was paraded before the eyes of an untested youth. The author died before he could complete his tale, and the unsolved mystery of the Grail has haunted us ever since. By a long series of imaginative transformations, the grail has moved...

For more then eight centuries, poets and writers have been telling stories about King Arthur. From lost legends and scraps of history, from facts and folklore, has been fashioned one of the greatest epics in all literature, full of the world's splendours, heroic loves and spiritual quests. This anthology is a celebration of the magical and mysterious world founded on the figure of an obscure Welsh princeling, of Arthur's exploits in literature, of...