The Penguin History of Europe: Volume 3:Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe S.) - Hardcover

Jordan, William Chester

3.72

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9780713990843: The Penguin History of Europe: Volume 3:Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe S.)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713990848 ISBN 13: 9780713990843

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2001

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With a lucid and clear narrative style William Chester Jordan has turned his considerable talents to composing a standard textbook of the opening centuries of the second millennium in Europe. He brings this period of dramatic social, political, economic, cultural, religious and military change, alive to the general reader. Jordan presents the early Medieval period as a lost world, far removed from our current age, which had risen from the smoking rubble of the Roman Empire, but from which we are cut off by the great plagues and famines that ended it. Broad in scope, punctuated with impressive detail, and highly accessible, Jordan's book is set to occupy a central place in university courses of the medieval period.

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Review:

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

With five volumes now out, the Penguin History of Europe series ... is shaping up to be the best general account available, superseding all previous ones (Economist)

Synopsis:

The world of mediaeval Europe continues to haunt us: its great works of art, its cathedrals and castles, many of its institutions - and yet this is a civilization from which we are fundamentally cut off. The uniquely terrible "fire break" of the 14th century - the famines, plagues and wars -meant that the Europe that slowly built itself in the 15th century was a very different place from the brilliant, confident world that had built Chartres cathedral or summoned up the passion for the Crusades. In what should become the standard work on the subject, Professor Jordan re-creates the values and achievements of this lost world with a mixture of broad sweep and precise detail that allows readers to appreciate a society that had emerged from the chaos of the Viking, Hungarian and Muslim invasions and soon began to measure itself confidently against the lofty achievements of the ancient Roman Empire. Above all, Europe in the High Middle Ages was a fervently Christian society and it was the power and ambition of the Church, and the extensive support it enjoyed, that provided the great motor for dynamic and aggressive innovation that marks the era.

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