Set in the twelfth-century England when the empress Maud and Stephen are fighting for the crown of England after the death of Henry, chronicles the struggle to build a cathedral. The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known . . . of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect--a man divided in his soul . . . of the beautiful, elusive...

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their...

"An infamous Renaissance classic, The Prince shocked Europe upon publication with its ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. Niccolo Machiavelli even came to be regarded by some as an agent of the Devel, his name taken for the intriguer "Machevill" of Jacobean tragedy. For his treatise on statecraft Machiavelli drew upon his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting...

"Text and detailed drawings follow the planning and construction of a "typical" castle and adjoining town in thirteenth-century Wales."--Title page verso.