The history of the Middle Ages is one of believers and barbarians, popes and peasants. It is the story of competing empires and unforgettable leaders. The Middle Ages laid the groundwork for the growth of early modern Europe. From its bustling cities, distinguished universities, soaring cathedrals, and trade routes, Europe began to reach ut to the rest of the world.

This comprehensive historical atlas concentrates on the Mediterranean world but also shows what happened across the globe between A.D. 400 and 1500--from the fall of Rome to the age of discovery. Sumptuously illustrated, it features period works of art, fascinating maps, quotes from medieval figures, close-ups of intriguing artifacts, and rich landscape photographs. For every century, a signature city is spotlighted to represent that era's developments, and time lines connect the many dramatic events that took place in these dark and exciting times.

Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

This uniquely ambitious history offers an account of all aspects of cultural activity and production throughout the world of Latin Christendom 1200-1450. Beginning with a detailed description of the political and economic circumstances that allowed the 'Gothic Moment' to flourish, the body of the book is both a celebration of the Gothic cultural achievement - in cathedral-building, in manuscript illumination, in chivalric love-romance, in stained glass and in many other arts - and an investigation of its social origins and systems of production.

The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800 is a pioneering exploration of both the lives of the very poorest during the early modern period, and of the vast edifices of compassion and coercion erected around them by individuals, institutions, and states. The essays chart critical new directions in poverty scholarship and connect poverty to the environment, debt and downward social mobility, material culture, empires, informal economies, disability, veterancy, and more. The volume contributes to the understanding of societal transformations across the early modern period, and places poverty and the poor at the centre of these transformations. It also argues for a wider definition of poverty in history which accounts for much more than economic and social circumstance and provides both analytically critical overviews and detailed case studies. By exploring poverty and the poor across early modern Europe, this study is essential reading for students and researchers of early modern society, economic history, state formation and empire, cultural representation, and mobility.

"Examines the full range of African-European encounters from an unfamiliar African perspective rather than from the customary European one"--Publisher description.

Publication of Lost Worlds introduces to English-speaking readers one of the most original and engaging historians in Germany today. Known for his work in historical demography, Arthur E. Imhof here branches out into folklore, religion, anthropology, psychology, and the history of art. Imhof begins by reconstructing the world and worldview of Johannes Hooss, a farmer in a remote Hessian village. The everyday life of such a man was particular to his region; he spoke a local dialect and shared a regional culture. By exploring the various systems that made sense out of this circumscribed existence - astrology, the folklore of the seasons, and Christian interpretations of birth, confirmation, marriage, and death - Imhof expands the book into a speculation on why life in the late twentieth century can seem meaningless and difficult. Rooted in Imhof's belief that we need stability and values that transcend the individual, Lost Worlds inspires us to examine our own ways of seeing the world.