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Henry Mayr-Harting.
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1066-1272.

Publisher: Longman/Pearson.
Publication due: May 2011.
Page count: 380pp.

Publisher's recommended price
Paperback ISBN 9780582414136, £19.99

Description:

The period from 1066 to 1272, from the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry III was one of enormous political change in England and of innovation in the Church as a whole. This was the period of the Gregorian reforms, of the foundation of the friars' orders of Franciscans and Dominicans and of the philosophical and proto-scientific flowering known as the twelfth century Renaissance. In England it was a time of extraordinary figures - Ailred of Rivaulx, Thomas à Becket, Christina of Markyate among others.

Henry Mayr-Harting here charts the many ways in which a constantly changing religious culture impacted on a political system which was itself for the most part dominated by clerics and on a social and economic world in which monasteries functioned as major economic centres. At the same time he shows how religious life in its turn changed in response to changing social conditions - how the friars were in part a response to increasing urbanisation, how rising population fuelled the economic activities of the monasteries, and how parish reform demanded a more educated clergy and by this increased the social prestige of the Church.

Contents:
Chapter 1 Church and Economy in the Long Twelfth Century
Chapter 2 The Church and the Norman Conquest
Chapter 3 Henry I and His Religion.
Chapter 4 The Conflict Between Henry II and Thomas Becket
Chapter 5 Parishes and Parish Priests
Chapter 6 The Monastic Century 1066-1216
Chapter 7 Archbishop Hubert Walter and St Hugh of Lincoln: Church and King in the late Twelfth Century
Chapter 8 Intellectual Life and Culture and How Related to Politics in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries
Chapter 9 The Early English Franciscans
Chapter 10 Changes and Continuities under Henry III