Prof Peter Edbury
Peter W. Edbury (2009) Philip of Novara: Le Livre de Forme de Plait. Series: Texts and Studies in the History of Cyprus. Cyprus Research Centre.
Abstract – This is a critical edition and translation of the legal treatise by Philip of Novara who was writing ca. 1250.
Philip was a knight with fiefs in both the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Cyprus. He was respected as the best pleader of his day in the High Courts of these two kingdoms. His Livre de Forme de Plait explains how to plead and discusses the customary law as administered in the royal court, giving important insights into the outlook and assumptions of the fief-holding classes in the mid thirteenth century.
Peter W. Edbury (2003) John of Ibelin, Le Livre des Assises. Series: The Medieval Mediterranean. Brill.
Abstract - This is a critical edition of the legal treatise by John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa and Ascalon (died 1266).
John was a leading magnate in the Latin East, and his first-hand experience of the courts meant that he was well-placed to write authoritatively on his subject. His work is in French and describes in detail the procedures of the High Court of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the law as administered there.
The treatise has long been recognized as being of fundamental importance for the legal, institutional and social history of the Latin settlements in the Levant, and is the first edition to take into account all the surviving manuscripts and the first to be published since 1841.
Peter W. Edbury (1997) John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Boydell Press.
Abstract - Conceived as the ‘pre-quel’ to the critical edition of John’s writings, this study examines the author’s career and antecedents in the Latin East, and considers some important material dating from the mid-1180s that John incorporated into his treatise in what nowadays would be labelled an appendix. The Ibelin family rose from obscure origins in the early twelfth century to be the leading aristocratic family in the kingdoms of Cyprus and Jerusalem in the thirteenth. The information he preserved on the administration of justice in the kingdom of Jerusalem and on the military obligations on the eve of the battle of Hattin and the collapse of the kingdom in 1187 is of fundamental importance.
Peter W. Edbury (1991, pbk 1994) The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374. Cambridge University Press.
Abstract - The island of Cyprus was conquered from its Byzantine ruler by Richard I of England in 1191 during the Third Crusade, and remained under western rule until the Ottoman conquest of 1570-71. From the 1190s until the 1470s the island was kingdom governed by the members of the Lusignan dynasty. The Lusignans, who hailed from Poitou in western France, imposed a new European landowning class and a Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy upon the indigenous Greek population. Their regime provided long periods of political stability and, until the late fourteenth century, a considerable period of prosperity. In the thirteenth century the island was closely linked to the Latin states in Syria and the Holy Land by political, social and economic ties and, with the fall of the last Christian strongholds to the Muslims in 1291, it became the most easterly outpost of Latin Christendom in the Mediterranean.
This study traces the fortunes of Cyprus under its royal dynasty and its role in the crusades and in the confrontation of Christian and Muslim in the Near East until the 1370s when it was severely weakened in a war with Genoa.
Peter W. Edbury, John Gordon Rowe (1988, pbk 1990) William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East. Series: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought. Cambridge University Press.
Abstract - William, archbishop of Tyre from 1175 to c.1184, was a churchman, royal servant and scholar who lived in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Born in Jerusalem around 1130, he studied in Western Europe for almost twenty years until 1165 when he returned to the East and began his career there in public life. He left to posterity a monumental history in which he described the events of the First Crusade (1095-99) and recorded the fortunes of the western rulers of the states subsequently founded in Syria and the Holy Land down to his own day.
The value of his work as an example of twelfth-century historiography and as a source of information for the events described has long been recognized. In this study Peter Edbury and the late John Rowe (formerly of the University of Western Ontario) considered William’s role in public life and as a historian, and examined the influences which bore upon his writing and the way in which he fashioned his material in attempting to see why he wrote as he did. Among the topics analyzed are the monarchy in Jerusalem, the Church, the papacy, the Byzantine Empire and the Crusade.
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