The Worlds of Medieval Europe

The Worlds of Medieval Europe updates and revises textbook representations of the Middle Ages in several exciting ways. It balances the traditional focus on political affairs, especially those of northern Europe, with equally detailed attention to medieval society as it developed in the Mediterranean, resulting in the nuanced portrayal of a multifarious western world that was sharply divided between its northern and southern aspects. It also integrates the histories of the Islamic and Byzantine world into the main narrative, rather than isolating them in discrete chapters, and in so doing it brings to new life the continuum of interaction-social, cultural, and intellectual as well as commercial-that existed between all three societies. Finally, it emphasizes throughout the ways in which the medieval Latin West attempted to understand the unified and rational structure of the human cosmos that it believed was always there beneath the observable diversity and disorder of the world; indeed this effort to re-create a human ordering of unity through diversity provides an essential key to understanding medieval Europe and the ways in which it regarded and reacted to the worlds around it.