This 1000-year history of the civilization of western Europe has been recognized in France as a scholarly contribution of the highest order and as a popular classic. Jacques Le Goff has written a book which will be read by generations of students and historians. Part one is a narrative account of the entire period, from the barbarian settlement of Roman Europe in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries to the war-torn crises of Christian Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Part two is analytical, concerned with the origins of early medieval ideas of culture and religion, the constraints of time and space in a pre-industrial world and the reconstruction of the lives and sensibilities of the people during this long period. Le Goff combines the narrative and descriptive power characteristic of Anglo-Saxon scholarship with the sensitivity and insight of the French historical tradition.--From publisher description.

In this pioneering work Jacques Le Goff examines both the creation of the medieval universities in the great cities of the European High Middle Ages, and the linked origins of the intellectuals - the first Europeans since the Classic Age to owe their livelihoods to their teaching and accumulation of knowledge. The author's argument is that the intellectuals, Abelard most typically, were a new category of person (neither monk nor knight) with a new method (scholastic dialectic) and a new objective (knowledge for its own sake). For the first time in Spain, France, England and Germany the luxury of thinking and learning ceased to be the limited preserve of the higher echelons of the Church and the Court. The effect, the author shows, was to bring about an irreversible shift in European culture. This intellectual history of medieval Europe (translated from the revised French edition of 1984) will be widely welcomed by students and scholars of the Middle Ages throughout the English-speaking world.

This book traces across the millennium of the Middle Ages the gradual crystallisation of a new and distinctive European identity. Koenigsberger covers the Islamic, Byzantine and central Asian worlds in his account which explains Europe's progression from chaos and collapse to the point where it was set to rule much of the world.

"When I studied these manuals, a source then little exploited, I noticed that the academic, like the merchant, was justified by reference to the labor he accomplished. The novelty of the academics thus ultimately appeared to lie in their role as intellectual workers. My attention was therefore drawn to two notions whose ideological avatars I attempted to trace through the concrete social conditions in which they developed. These notions were labor and time. Under these two heads I maintain two open files, from which some of the articles collected here are drawn. I am still persuaded that attitudes toward work and time are essential aspects of social structure and function, and that the study of such attitudes offers a useful tool for the historian who wishes to examine the societies in which they develop."--Preface, page xii

This illustrated text covers the history of the Middle Ages. The narrative discusses events in Europe alongside the spread of Islam and the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire. While the text gives ample coverage to political events, an equal emphasis is placed on social and cultural developments.

This ambitious and wide-ranging study of the European Middle Ages respects the complexity and richness of its subject; always accessible, it is never merely superficial or over-simplistic. Stressing the long-term factors of continuity, evolution and change throughout, David Nicholas discusses the social and economic aspects of medieval civilization, and examines their links with political, institutional and cultural development. Designed for students and non-specialists, his book triumphantly meets the need for a comprehensive survey of the medieval world within the covers of a single authoritative volume.