Europe in the High Middle Ages

by William Chester Jordan

Overview

From the Crusades to the plague, this account brings to life the key moments of the High Middle Ages.

It was an age of hope and possibility, of accomplishment and expansion. Europe's High Middle Ages spanned the Crusades, the building of Chartres Cathedral, Dante's Inferno, and Thomas Aquinas. Buoyant, confident, creative, the era seemed to be flowering into a true renaissance—until the disastrous fourteenth century rained catastrophe in the form of plagues, famine, and war.

In Europe in the High Middle Ages, William Chester Jordan paints a vivid, teeming landscape that captures this lost age in all its glory and complexity. Here are the great popes who revived the power of the Church against the secular princes; the writers and thinkers who paved the way for the Renaissance; the warriors who stemmed the Islamic tide in Spain and surged into Palestine; and the humbler estates, those who found new hope and prosperity until the long night of the 1300s. Part of the Penguin History of Europe series, edited by David Cannadine.

"The Penguin History of Europe series... is one of contemporary publishing's great projects."—New Statesman

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140166644
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/24/2004
Series:	The Penguin History of Europe
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

William Chester Jordan is Professor of History at Princeton University and the author of The Great Famine.

Table of Contents

Europe in the High Middle AgesList of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Notes on Names
Prologue

Part I: Europe in the Eleventh Century
1. Christendom in the Year 1000
2. Mediterranean Europe
3. Northmen, Celts and Anglo-Saxons
4. Francia/France
5. Central Europe

Part II: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
6. The Investiture Controversy
7. The First Crusade
8. The World of Learning
9. Cultural Innovations of the Twelfth Century: Vernacular Literature and Architecture
10. Political Power and Its Contexts I
11. Political Power and Its Contexts II

Part III: The Thirteenth Century
12. Social Structures
13. The Pontificate of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council
14. Learning
15. The Kingdoms of the North
16. Baltic and Central Europe
17. The Gothic World
18. Southern Europe

Part IV: Christendom in the Early Fourteenth Century
19. Famine and Plague
20. Political and Social Violence
21. The Church in Crisis

Epilogue
Appendix: Genealogical Tables
References
Suggested Reading
Index

Editorial Reviews

A chronicle of high ideals and cherished dreams—as well as famine, plague, holy war, and other apocalyptic horsemen in the making of Europe from the 11th to the 14th centuries. The year 1000, Haskins Medal–winner Jordan (The Great Famine, 2000) writes, saw the arrival of remarkable change in Europe. The lifting of the Dark Ages brought with it a huge gain in population (from two million to ten million in England, from four to fourteen million in German-speaking countries, and so on) and great advances in technology, including the adoption of three-field farming and the heavy plow. All of this led to prosperity and happier times for long-suffering peoples. At the outset of this period, Jordan (History/Princeton Univ.) reminds us, the Church had comparatively little power and influence: "To be a Catholic in the year 1000 required little change in traditional behavior, in part because there were so few people who were actively monitoring behavior on behalf of that vague body so conveniently yet deceptively referred to under the monolithic label, the Church." Three hundred years later, things were different: Political and ecclesiastical powers were centralized, orthodoxies were in place, crusades had been fought, heretics had been routed and burned. In a wide-ranging narrative that embraces most of the continent and takes in enlightened rulers (Stephen of Hungary, Henry II), adventurers (Richard Lion-heart, Tancred), despots (Fulk Nerra, Henry III), and assorted saints and sages (Dominic, Thomas Aquinas), Jordan charts the course of this growing centralization and its eventual collapse under the weight of famine, disease, incompetence, and gunpowder. He writes elegantly and ironically ("therewas curiously little pacifism in the High Middle Ages"), giving the reader a broad but not dumbed-down view of medieval society and its complexities, which must have seemed to contemporaries very bewildering indeed. A splendid start to Penguin’s History of Europe series and a first-rate work in its own right.

Kirkus Reviews