Showing results by narrator "Jennifer M Dixon" in All Categories

The lives of the sons of Eleanor of Aquitaine are the stuff of legend. Her daughters, however, are less well known, and the fascinating personalities of her daughters-in-law have been almost entirely overlooked, as have those of the daughters she bore Louis VII of France. The Families of Eleanor of Aquitaine redresses this balance and showcases the lives, travels, and careers of these ten very different women, who formed a great international network of political alliances that linked their parents, siblings, husbands, and children all across Europe and the Holy Land.

The history of women in medieval Wales before the English conquest of 1282 is one largely shrouded in mystery. This misfortune touches even the most well-known royal woman of the time, Joan of England, the wife of Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd. This first-ever account of Siwan, as she was known to the Welsh, interweaves the details of her life and relationships with a gendered re-assessment of Anglo-Welsh politics by highlighting her involvement in affairs, discussing events in which she may well have been involved but have gone unrecorded and her deployment of royal female agency.

The rose is bursting with meaning: Over the centuries, it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death, and the mystical unknown. Today the rose enjoys unrivalled popularity across the globe, ever present at life's seminal moments.

Elizabeth Bennet may be a heroine, but by defying some of the most powerful mages in England, she has made enemies who will stop at nothing to embroil her in scandal. So when she is accused of endangering the Royal Mages through her reckless actions, she no longer knows who to trust. Even the gentleman she loves is taking their side. It seems the only person who believes her is the captive French mage who is imprisoned in the cellar at Netherfield.

Child abuse casts a long shadow over the history of childhood. Across the centuries there are numerous accounts of children being beaten, neglected, sexually assaulted, or even killed by those closest to them. This book explores this darker side of childhood history, looking at what constituted cruelty towards children in the past and at the social responses towards it. Focusing primarily on England, it is a history of violence against children in their own homes, covering a large timeframe which extends from medieval times to the present.

Every age and social strata has its bad eggs, rule-breakers, and nose-thumbers. As acclaimed popular historian and author of How to Be a Victorian Ruth Goodman reveals in her madcap chronicle, Elizabethan England was particularly rank with troublemakers, from snooty needlers who took aim with a cutting "thee" to lowbrow drunkards with revolting table manners. Goodman draws on advice manuals, court cases, and sermons to offer this colorfully crude portrait of offenses most foul.

In AD 60/61, Rome almost lost the province of Britain to a woman. Boudica, wife of the client king Prasutagus, fomented a rebellion that proved catastrophic for Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London), and Verulamium (St. Albans), destroyed part of a Roman legion, and caused the deaths of an untold number of veterans, families, soldiers, and Britons. Yet with one decisive defeat, her vision of freedom was destroyed, and the Iceni never rose again. Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain introduces listeners to the life and literary importance of Boudica.

In this intimate history of the extraordinary Black Plague pandemic that swept through the British Isles in 1665, Evelyn Lord focuses on the plague's effects on smaller towns, where every death was a singular blow affecting the entire community. Lord's fascinating reconstruction of life during plague times presents the personal experiences of a wide range of individuals, from historical notables to common folk. The Great Plague brings this dark era to vivid life through stories of loss and survival from those who grieved, those who fled, and those who hid to await their fate.

The ruins of ancient Athens, Luxor, and Rome are familiar cornerstones of world history, visited by travelers from across the globe. But what about the cities that have dropped off the map? Where are they, and what can they tell us about our past? In this compendium of forgotten cities, Philip Matyszak explores the trials, tribulations, and triumphs these cities faced.

Anthony Trollope is among the best-loved novelists in the English language. This Very Short Introduction will place Trollope's work in the context of his life and times, drawing on recent scholarship to illuminate his central interests and literary strategies. The major series of novels (the six novels located in the fictional Barsetshire, and the six Palliser novels) are explored alongside the novels set in Ireland, his travel writing, and his less well-known fiction.

Elizabeth and Darcy are finally settling down at the Netherfield Royal Mages Academy when a mysterious flare of magic sends them scampering to discover what is happening. But they are soon left with more questions than answers. Why has Elizabeth's sister Lydia gone missing? Who is the mysterious gentleman they encountered at an inn? And more importantly, why have they been summoned to London to attend to the Prince Regent himself? As Elizabeth and Darcy grapple with the revelations, they find themselves caught up in a web of deception that could lead to the downfall of the Kingdom itself.

She keeps house for Inspector Witherspoon...and keeps him on his toes. Everyone's awed by his Scotland Yard successes - but they don't know about his secret weapon. No matter how messy the murder or how dirty the deed, Mrs. Jeffries's polished detection skills are up to the task...proving that behind every great man there's a woman - and that a crimesolver's work is never done. It took no time at all for the magistrate to rule the death of Harlan Westover a suicide. But not everyone is convinced by the result of what may have been a slip-shod investigation.

Zoologist Jo Wimpenny turns a critical eye to Aesop's fables to discover whether there is any scientific truth to their portrayal of the animal kingdom. She brings the tales into the twenty-first century, introducing the latest findings on the most fascinating branches of ethological research—the study of why animals do the things they do. In each chapter she interrogates a classic fable and a different topic—future planning, tool use, self-recognition, cooperation and deception—concluding with a verdict on the veracity of each fable's portrayal from a scientific perspective.

Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature.

Listen to the story of Peter who did not listen to his Mother and got into trouble!

Mr. Jeremy Fisher goes fishing and encounters such dangers! Oh dear, will he ever go fishing again?

Lucy goes looking for her handkerchiefs and finds Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle but is this little lady all that she seems to be?

Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court-men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer's People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. In Chaucer's People, we meet, again, the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.

During the Second World War, people arrived in Britain from all over the world as troops, war-workers, nurses, refugees, exiles, and prisoners-of-war, chiefly from Europe, America, and the British Empire. Between 1939 and 1945, the population in Britain became more diverse than it had ever been before. Through diaries, letters, and interviews, Mixing It tells of ordinary lives pushed to extraordinary lengths.

Alice George is a headstrong young British woman who finds herself living among the Tuareg, a tribe of nomadic warriors. While the outside world faces the catastrophe of World War I, the Tuareg continue to crisscross the Sahara as a matrilineal society in which the men are veiled, and the women hold property—a world in which anything can happen. It is a world well suited to eighteen-year-old Alice, who discovers a life she could never live in corseted England. In 1917, Alice returns home to a world completely alien to the one she left in the Sahara.