Books like Medieval civilization, 400-1500 by Jacques Le Goff

A sweeping, narrative history of the Middle Ages that blends cultural, religious, and social insight with updated scholarship and new biographical sketches, offering a fresh, engaging view of medieval life.

In this small book David Herlihy makes subtle and subversive inquiries that challenge historical thinking about the Black Death. Looking beyond the view of the plague as unmitigated catastrophe, Herlihy finds evidence for its role in the advent of new population controls, the establishment of universities, the spread of Christianity, the dissemination of vernacular cultures, and even the rise of nationalism. This book, which displays a distinguished scholar’s masterly synthesis of diverse materials, reveals that the Black Death can be considered the cornerstone of the transformation of Europe.—Publisher

In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian re-examines what we thought we knew. Lewis reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished--a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity--while proto-Europe made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery.--From publisher description.

An in‑depth look at medieval civilization, combining scholarly commentary with medieval art and writings.

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country. This book integrates documentary and archaeological evidence together, and provides a history of the period 400—800, by means of systematic comparative analyses of each of the regions of the latest Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt (only the Slav areas are left out). The book concentrates on classic socio-economic themes, state finance, the wealth and identity of the aristocracy, estate management, peasant society, rural settlement, cities, and exchange. These are only a partial picture of the period, but they are intended as a framing for other developments, without which those other developments cannot be properly understood. The book argues that only a complex comparative analysis can act as the basis for a wider synthesis. The book takes all different developments as typical, and constructs a synthesis based on a better understanding of difference and the reasons for it.