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Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty, mountebanks,
Knights Templar, merchants, prostitutes, and canons. Bursting
outward from the encompassing wall, it was Europe's largest, most
cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians
over the course of a dozen generations as Paris grew from a
military stronghold after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 to a city
recovering from the Black Death of the 1390s.Roux peers into the
private lives of people within their homes and chronicles the
public world of affairs and entertainments, filling the pages of
her book with laborers, shopkeepers, magistrates, thieves, and
prelates. She examines the varied populations living within their
own realms but sharing the streets of the metropolis, in the Latin
Quarter, where the university dominated; in the precincts of Notre
Dame, with its large number of clerical inhabitants; the mercantile
Right Bank; and in the area surrounding the royal palace of the
Louvre, with its attendant palaces for the king's satellites. She
breathes life into dusty documents by explicating the lingo of
street insults, making sense of the cults of saints--Sebastian, who
was riddled with arrows, became the patron saint of tapestry
workers--and entering the courtrooms and confessionals to tell how
people actually ate, slept, dressed, fought, worked, and worshipped
in the later Middle Ages.
In the growth of towns and the revival of commerce, historians have
seen the development of a bourgeois and capitalist Europe, but
Pierre Riché reminds us that Carolingians saw a world of forest
and wasteland, in which scattered castles and villages were
outposts against the savagery of nature, bands of outlaws, and a
myriad of pagan superstitions. Daily Life in the World of
Charlemagne gives us a vivid and deeply textured picture of the
fear and insecurity that drove people, great and humble alike, to
draw together with one another, with their stronger neighbors, and
with God and His saints, in search of protection and sustenance.
Riché makes extensive use of modern social history techniques and
the tools of new studies on nutrition, disease, demography, and
climatology, as well as art history and archaeology, to comprehend
the Carolingian mentality and reconstruct the material culture of
the early European world.
Sainted Women of the Dark Ages makes available the lives of
eighteen Frankish women of the sixth and seventh centuries, all of
whom became saints. Written in Latin by contemporaries or near
contemporaries, and most translated here for the first time, these
biographies cover the period from the fall of the Roman Empire and
the conversion of the invading Franks to the rise of Charlemagne's
family. Three of these holy women were queens who turned to
religion only after a period of intense worldly activity. Others
were members of the Carolingian family, deeply implicated in the
political ambitions of their male relatives. Some were partners in
the great Irish missions to the pagan countryside and others worked
for the physical salvation of the poor. From the peril and
suffering of their lives they shaped themselves as paragons of
power and achievement. Beloved by their sisters and communities for
their spiritual gifts, they ultimately brought forth a new model of
sanctity. These biographies are unusually authentic. At least two
were written by women who knew their subjects, while others reflect
the direct testimony of sisters within the cloister walls. Each
biography is accompanied by an introduction and notes that clarify
its historical context. This volume will be an excellent source for
students and scholars of women's studies and early medieval social,
religious, and political history.
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