Ian Wood

The great missionary figures were crucial to their own time and to posterity. They brought Christian belief and culture to the pagan societies of Dark Age Europe. Not only agents of change, they were also some of Europe's finest historians, leaving a detailed record of the cultures they transformed. The work of St Augustine in England is just one example. Anyone who has read Ian Wood's equally ambitious and compelling survey The Missionary Life, will rediscover his ability to bring a remote age to life. The unreliable history of the missionary life is disentangled to produce a uniquely wide-ranging account - giving a sense of the individual experience and collective ethos of the mission, the missionaries' influence on communities and their links to the rest of Christendom.

A comprehensive survey which begins with the rise of the Franks, then examines the Merovingians.

Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages is a collection of essays presented to John Taylor, former Life Fellow and medieval scholar at the University of Leeds. The essays in the volume have two clear foci, also those of John Taylor’s own work: the study of history-writing in the middle ages and the late medieval church. With contributions key scholars on topics such as the hagiography of Saint-Wandrille, Swein Forkbeard and the historians, personal seals in 13th-century England, women in the Plumpton Correspondence and medievalism in counter-reformation Sicily, this volume is a rich and varied collection of medieval scholarship and a fitting tribute to Taylor’s work from his friends and colleagues.