An annotated starting point for a MA medieval history reading list (revised August 2014).
1.
General studies of medieval history and methodology
Blockmans, Wim and Peter Hoppenbrouwers. Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1550 , 2 nd edition
(Routledge, 2014).
Glenn W. Bowerstock etal. Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post Classical World (Harvard, 1999).
Clemens, Ray and Timothy L. Graham. An Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell, 2007).
Lansing Carol and Edward English, Blackwell Companion to Medieval History (Blackwell, 2010).
Paradigm Shifters: Medieval History studies that have changed the way scholars look at events, persons, ideas…..
Barthélemy, Dominique.
The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian (Cornell, 2009).
Bartlett, Robert. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? (Princeton, 2013).
Bisson, Thomas, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship and the Origins of European
Government (Princeton, 2009).
Boswell, John. Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980) and Matthew
Kuefler, ed. The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality ,
(Chicago, 2006).
Brown, Michelle, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe (Toronto, 2003).
Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton, 2012).
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women (University of California Press, 1987).
Cameron, Averil, Byzantine Matters (Princeton, 2014).
Catlos, Brian. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom (1050-1614) (Cambridge, 2014).
Elliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell:
(Penn, 2011).
Farmer, Sharon. Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender Ideology and the Daily Lives of the Poor
(Cornell, 2005).
Geary, Patrick. The Myth of Nations: the Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2003).
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Grundmann, Herbert/ Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: the Historical Links between Heresy, the
Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism . (Rev. 2nd ed., Notre Dame, 1995 (1935).
Housely, Norman.
Contesting the Crusades (Blackwell, 2006).
Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages , transl. Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch
(Chicago, 1997).
Jaeger, Stephen.
The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200
(Penn, 2000).
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton,
1957).
McCormick, Michael Origins of the European Economy, 300-900 (Cambridge, 2001).
McKitterick, Rosamond. Charlemagne: the Formation of European Identity (Cambridge, 2008).
Miller, Maureen. The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (Cornell, 2000).
Moore, R.I. Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe , 2 nd , e
(Blackwell, 2008).
Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: The Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
(Princeton, 1996)
Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell, 2005).
Smith, Katherine Allen. War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture (Boydell and Brewer, 2011).
Southern, Richard. The Making of the Middle Ages (Yale, 1953).
Van Engen, John and Thomas Noble, eds. European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre
Dame, 2012)
Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford,
2005).