| Manufacturer | USA Oxford University Press |
In medieval Europe hostages were given, not taken. They were a means of guarantee used to secure transactions ranging from treaties to wartime commitments to financial transactions. In principle, the force of the guarantee lay in the threat to the life of the hostage if the agreement were broken but, while violation of agreements was common, execution of hostages was a rarity.
Medieval hostages are thus best understood not as simple pledges, but as a political institution characteristic of the medieval millennium, embedded in its changing historical contexts. In the Early Middle Ages, hostageship was principally seen in warfare and diplomacy, operating within structures of kinship and practices of alliance characteristic of elite political society.
From the eleventh century, hostageship diversified, despite the spread of a legal and financial culture that would seem to have made it superfluous. Hostages in the Middle Ages traces the development of this institution from Late Antiquity through the period of the Hundred Years War, across Europe and the Mediterranean World.
It explores the logic of agreements, the identity of hostages, and the conditions of their confinement, while shedding light on a wide range of subjects, from sieges and treaties, to captivity and ransom, to the Peace of God and the Crusades, to the rise of towns and representation, to political communication and shifting gender dynamics.
The book closes by examining the reasons for the decline of hostageship in the Early Modern era, and the rise the modern variety of hostageship that was addressed by the Nuremberg tribunals and the United Nations in the twentieth century. Review: this is an excellent and closely reasoned book which casts light on a neglected and very important area of medieval life. * John France, War in History * Kosto has shed a great deal of light on a hitherto infrequently studied aspect of medieval history ...
This is an important book. * American Historical Review * This new history of, and framework for understanding, hostageship is a major contribution that will make the hostages of the past difficult to ignore. Military, legal, political, diplomatic, social and economic historians of numerous periods and regions will read this book with great reward. * Guy Geltner, English Historical Review * Kosto's clear and systematic work is testament to his brilliance, not only as a historian, but also as a storyteller.
The book itself is packed with wonderfully illuminating material on the medieval hostage, but also the analogous development of medieval power structures and society. The versatility of this book means that it would not only be of interest to a well-established historian (legal or otherwise), but also to a non-historian, or someone starting out in the field. * Shavana Musa, Reviews in History *
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