Ebook: Categories of Medieval Culture

Translated from the Russian by G. L. Campbell.

First published as 'Kategorii srednevekovoi kultury', Moscow, 1972.

The Middle Ages - the very words bring a succession of familiar images flooding into the mind: feudal castles and Gothic cathedrals, crusades and baronial wars, the glitter of the tournament and the flames of Inquisitorial fires. But these are all external trappings, a sort of ornamental screen behind which real people lived and worked. In this wide-ranging and immensely readable book, Professor Gurevich concentrates on the people of the Middle Ages and how they saw the world they lived in.

Medieval men and women were both like and unlike us. Their behaviour - social, economic, political, religious - was regulated by their picture of the world. Professor Gurevich therefore looks at the ideas which medieval people had about their own world. He discusses the most important concepts of medieval culture - space and time, law, the attitude towards work, wealth and poverty - as they are reflected in the vernacular literature of the time: sagas, epics, courtly romances, the love songs of the troubadours, and the works of Dante, as well as in numerous Latin writings. His study of these categories enables us to reconstruct the culture of the Middle Ages, revealing it as a culture which resulted from the meeting and interpenetration of several traditions - Christian, classical and barbarian.