Contributing Authors Include Raphael Levy, W. H. Bowen, Helmut Hatzfeld, And Many Others.

For many years I have found it difficult to assign reading material for background in medieval civilization to students of Old French and Provencal. Many works of great erudition are available, but none of these presents a cohesive picture. Details are taken from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries and placed side by side; the Middle Ages are discussed as though they were a single, homogeneous era. Still another lack has been the absence of information on many little matters which could be reasonably answered by conjecture and by the weighing of some conflicting evidence. The present books seeks to revise this prevailing methodology and to establish a precedent of a different kind. The treatment is limited to a unit of fifty years. Descriptions and characterizations have been selected so as to reveal in close detail the conditions of life in this restricted period.