ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an opportunity to delve deeply into several key themes that are critical to shaping monarchical rule, and illustrates its vibrancy and adaptability as a model of rulership. It provides an examination of the astonishing ability of monarchy to function as an effective method of government in an intellectual environment that considered it either irrelevant or, worse still, was openly hostile to the very concept of kingship. The book considers some of the ways in which Europeans responded to an environment that was undergoing rapid change on both an intellectual and a material level. The intellectual revival of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took place in the context of broader social and economic changes that involved, in particular, growing urbanization, developing trade networks and renewed interaction between Western Europe and the wider world.
