Here are some of the books that have influenced the ways we think about the period 500–1500, with their research findings and interpretations.
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).
Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 400–1500, trans. Julia Barrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 1969).
Eileen Power, Medieval People (London: Methuen, 1924).
Richard W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1953).
Chapter 1: ‘The Middle Ages’?
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1994).
Nora Berend (ed.), Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c.900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Yitzhak Hen, Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
William C. Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London: Allen Lane, 2001).
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: Athlone, 1993).
Julia M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500–1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London: Alan Lane, 2009).
Chapter 2: People and their life-styles
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Patrick J. Geary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press, 1999).
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven (CN): Yale Nota Bene, 2005).
Phillipp R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Chapter 3: The big idea: Christian salvation
Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven (CN): Yale University Press, 2004).
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, 10th anniversary rev. edn (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley (CA): University of California Press, 1987).
Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 1994).
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Aldershot: Scolar, 1990).
Chapter 4: Kingship, lordship, and government
Sverre Bagge, From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c.900–1350 (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 2010).
Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2009).
Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Chapter 5: Exchange, environments, and resources
Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
William C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press: 1996).
Paolo Squatriti, Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Chapter 6: The ‘Middle Ages’ of ‘others’
Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian–Jewish Relations, 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2011).
Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca (NY): Cornell Univesrity Press, 2002).
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 1996).
Chapter 7: The ‘Middle Ages’ in our daily lives
Christopher de Hamel, Bibles: An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011).
Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
Ian Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University c.1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).