"Poet, essayist, musician, and visionary, Hildegard of Bingen is the most well-known female mystic of the Middle Ages, renowed in Europe for advising popes and bishops." This work tours the abbey Hildegard founded in the Rhine river valley, highlights key events in her life, along with audio accompaniments from selections of Hildegard's musical compositions.

From the schism between Rome and Constantinople to the rise of the T'ang Dynasty, from the birth of Muhammad to the crowning of Charlemagne, this erudite book tells the fascinating, often violent story of kings, generals, and the peoples they ruled. In her earlier work, The History of the Ancient World, Susan Wise Bauer wrote of the rise of kingship based on might. But in the years between the fourth and the twelfth centuries, rulers had to find new...