Series Editors: James Muldoon, The John Carter Brown Library
and Rutgers University, USA and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Notre
Dame University, USA
The 'rise of the west' is the most familiar and most elusive
topic in global history. Everyone agrees it happened. No one
can say how, when, where or why, without provoking dissent.
Yet the world we inhabit is, by universal acknowledgement, the
outcome.
In recent years, controversy has focussed on the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the 'early modern period',
when Western expansion became a conspicuous phenomenon in a world
of colliding empires and unprecedented long-range cultural
exchange. But, like most such apparently new departures in history,
Western European activity in the 'expanding world' of early
modernity is best understood against a background of long,
sometimes faltering preparation in the Middle Ages.
Therefore, following the success of the series, a series of key
papers on the period, published by Ashgate and edited by AJR
Russell-Wood, Ashgate has commissioned an attempt to collect
cutting-edge research on the medieval background and events of
European expansion. Felipe Fernández-Armesto and James
Muldoon have gathered classic and key contributions from learned
journals and other arcane publications to give readers a conspectus
of knowledge, analysis and reflection on the history of the
frontiers, mental horizons, internal expansion and means of growth
of Latin Christendom from the eleventh to the early sixteenth
centuries.