I read a lot of books. I tend to focus primarily in the area of my undergraduate study, and that is 19th Century English and French fiction. My favorite being Thomas Hardy and his pastorals, Dickens and his characters, Flaubert and his social criticism. I am also quite partial to Hemingway and his nostalgic melancholy. That said, I do venture off the beaten path every now and again. Currently I am wading through a bit of medieval history. I just finished this wonderful work:
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| One-third of Western Europe's population died between 1348 and 1350, victims of the Black Death. Noted medievalist Norman Cantor tells the story of the pandemic and its widespread effects in In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made. |
Good read. A bit sporadic but very informative. Then these two just came in the mail today:
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| In A Distant Mirror, historian Barbara Tuchman reveals in harrowing detail a "tortured century" with parallels to our own. People in the fourteenth century were subjected to natural and man-made disasters, including the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, insurrection, lawlessness, the Schism of the Church, massacres of Jewish people, and the Black Death, which claimed the lives of nearly half the population living between India and Iceland. Barbara Tuchman introduces a nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy (1340-1397), a "whole man in a fractured time," who takes the reader through the century and gives a personalized context through which to understand the events and attitudes of the day. |
And the most anticipated...
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| In the near-glut of historical family studies, this is the first clearly focused on evidence about families medieval, English, and peasant. Hanawalt uses 3118 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths (mostly 14th century) and manorial court records (13th to early 16th century) to explore families' material environments, wealth, economic activities, life cycles, and surrogates. Nuclear groups created without good evidence of the so-called "Western European" or "Malthusian" marriage pattern lived in conjugal households where spouses were partners. Despite sociocultural changes, human biological needs made the family a tough and flexible institution. Hanawalt's sharp empirical corrective to much theoretical scholarship is informed with a humane understanding of medieval peasant life and belongs in college and public libraries. |
Here's to a good weekend!
