Change in Medieval Society: Europe North of the Alps, 1050-1500

Description

This book is designed to illustrate the liveliness of research into medieval communities and the channels of communication through which new movements of thought and aspiration took form and spread. It illustrates conservatism, conflict, failures, and circumstances that resisted control — monetary inflation, decline of population, the misery and isolation of the very poor — as well as triumphs of innovation. It shows how medievalists work, how they pose problems for research, and the innumerable kinds of evidence, literary and nonliterary, on which they draw. The book does not in any way profess to give a complete picture of the last half of the middle ages. The more familiar themes that are well treated in well-known books are deliberately omitted. The book is also deliberately confined for the most part to countries north of the Alps. The far-reaching influence of the Mediterranean world on the North needs a volume to itself. PREFACE v COMMUNITIES 1. From the Royal Court to the Court of Rome: The Suit of the Serfs of Rosny-Sous-Bois / Marc Bloch 3 2. On the Evidence of Growth of Population in the West from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Century / Léopold Génicot 14 3. German Towns and Slav Markets / Richard Koebner 30 REFORMERS 4. Gregorian Reform in Action: Clerical Marriage in England, 1050-1200 / C. N. L. Brooke 49 5. Economic Conservatism, Papal Finance, and the Medieval Satires on Rome / John A. Yunck 72 CAREERS, RANK, AND POWER 6. Gervase of Tilbury / H. G. Richardson 89 7. The Laicization of French and English Society in the Thirteenth Century / J. R. Strayer 103 8. The State and Landed Interests in Thirteenth Century France and England / Edward Miller 116 9. The Household of the Norwegian Kings in the Thirteenth Century / Laurence M. Larson 133 THE COMMUNICATION OF IDEAS 10. The Influence of Islamic Culture on Medieval Europe / Hamilton Gibb 155 11. The Gothic Cathedral: Design and Meaning / Otto G. von Simson 168 12. Quantification in Medieval Physics / A. C. Crombie 188 13. The Controversy Over the Alleged Sowers of the Black Death in the Contemporary Treatises on Plague / Séraphine Guerchberg 208 MONEY 14. Currency Depreciation in Medieval Europe / Carlo Cipolla 227 15. Wage Labour in France in the Later Middle Ages / E. Perroy 237 VIEWS OF SOCIETY 16. Chiliasm and the Hussite Revolution / Howard Kaminsky 249 17. Nationality at the Council of Constance: An Anglo-French Dispute / Louise R. Loomis 279 18. Medieval Democracy in the Brandenburg Towns and Its Defeat in the Fifteenth Century / F. L. Carsten 297 19. The Late Medieval Poor in Town and Countryside / F. Graus 314