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

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.