Dark Ages Companion

A sourcebook for Vampire: The Dark Ages offers information on new bloodlines and their mystical disciplines, the roads of the Cainites, and other details about paganism and medieval Europe necessary to enhance play of the role playing game.

Jane Eyre meets Twilight in Dark Companion, a lush and romantic YA gothic tale about an orphaned girl who attends an exclusive private school and finds herself torn between the headmistress's two sons. Orphaned at the age of six, Jane Williams has grown up in a series of foster homes, learning to survive in the shadows of life. Through hard work and determination, she manages to win a scholarship to the exclusive Birch Grove Academy. There, for the first time, Jane finds herself accepted by a group of friends. She even starts tutoring the headmistress's gorgeous son, Lucien. Things seem too good to be true. They are. The more she learns about Birch Grove's recent past, the more Jane comes to suspect that there is something sinister going on. Why did the wife of a popular teacher kill herself? What happened to the former scholarship student, whose place Jane took? Why does Lucien's brother, Jack, seem to dislike her so much? As Jane begins to piece together the answers to the puzzle, she must find out why she was brought to Birch Grove—and what she would risk to stay there.... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Dark Ages: Vampire takes you to the nights before the Camarilla, when kine truly had reason to be afraid of the dark. The vampires of this bygone age ride the dark as lords, play their games with the crowned heads of Europe, and travel to the mysterious lands of the East as they wage their ages-old war. The diablerie of saulot, the waking of Mithras, the destruction of Michael the patriarch, the return of the Dracon -- it all means the time of reflection is over. The Inquisition stirs and the time to act is now. Across Europe, monarchs of the night set princes and barons at each other's undying throats. Young vampires take to the field ready to claim their domain and become powerful lords in their own right. Blood calls to blood. The Dark Medieval is a very different time than the modern Final Nights. Cainites group in clans high and low, swear fealty to ancient vampiric monarchs and follow their roads of enlightenment in the same way mortals do religions. Ashen priests and princes face off in a violent world lit only by torches and fear. Dark Ages: Vampire Revised Edition is your complete guide to this time.

Why the prejudice against adopting a scientific attitude in the social sciences is creating a new 'Dark Ages' and preventing us from solving the perennial problems of crime, war, and poverty. During the Dark Ages, the progress of Western civilization virtually stopped. The knowledge gained by the scholars of the classical age was lost; for nearly 600 years, life was governed by superstitions and fears fueled by ignorance. In this outspoken and forthright book, Lee McIntyre argues that today we are in a new Dark Age—that we are as ignorant of the causes of human behavior as people centuries ago were of the causes of such natural phenomena as disease, famine, and eclipses. We are no further along in our understanding of what causes war, crime, and poverty—and how to end them—than our ancestors. We need, McIntyre says, another scientific revolution; we need the courage to apply a more rigorous methodology to human behavior, to go where the empirical evidence leads us—even if it threatens our cherished religious or political beliefs about human autonomy, race, class, and gender. Resistance to knowledge has always arisen against scientific advance. Today's academics—economists, psychologists, philosophers, and others in the social sciences—stand in the way of a science of human behavior just as clerics attempted to block the Copernican revolution in the 1600s. A scientific approach to social science would test hypotheses against the evidence rather than find and use evidence only to affirm a particular theory, as is often the practice in today's social sciences. Drawing lessons from Galileo's conflict with the Catholic church and current debates over the teaching of "creation science," McIntyre argues that what we need most to establish a science of human behavior is the scientific attitude—the willingness to hear what the evidence tells us even if it clashes with religious or political pieties—and the resolve to apply our findings to the creation of a better society.

A compact collection of focused introductions to and inquiries into medieval England, representing both history and literature.

Updated with the latest archaeological research new chapters on the most influential yet widely unrecognised people of the British isles, In Search of the Dark Ages illuminates the fascinating and mysterious centuries between the Romans and the Norman Conquest of 1066. In this new edition, Michael Wood vividly conjures some of the most important people in British history such as Hadrian, a Libyan refugee from the Arab conquests and arguably the most important person of African origin in British history, to Queen Boadicea, the leader of a terrible war of resistance against the Romans. Here too, warts and all, are the Saxon, Viking and Norman kings who laid the political foundations of England: Offa of Mercia, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, and William the Conqueror, whose victory at Hastings in 1066 marked the end of Anglo-Saxon England. Reflecting the latest historical, textual and archaeological research, this revised and updated edition of Michael Wood's classic book overturns preconceptions of the Dark Ages as a shadowy and brutal era, showing them to be a richly exciting and formative period in the history of Britain.

The Eucharist in the European Middle Ages was a multimedia event. First and foremost it was a drama, a pageant, a liturgy. The setting itself was impressive. Stunning artwork adorned massive buildings. Underlying and supporting the liturgy, the art and the architecture was a carefully constructed theological world of thought and belief. Popular beliefs, spilling over into the magical, celebrated that presence in several tumultuous forms. Church law regulated how far such practice might go as well as who was allowed to perform the liturgy and how and when it might be performed. This volume presents the medieval Eucharist in all its glory combining introductory essays on the liturgy, art, theology, architecture, devotion and theology. Contributors include: Celia Chazelle, Michael Driscoll, Edward Foley, Stephen Edmund Lahey, Lizette Larson-Miller, Ian Christopher Levy, Gerhard Lutz, Gary Macy, Miri Rubin, Elizabeth Saxon, Kristen Van Ausdall and Joseph Wawrykow.