Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World - Softcover

Rosenwein, Barbara H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551116936 ISBN 13: 9781551116938

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division, 2006

Synopsis

Please Note: This edition is now sold out and there is a new second edition available — ISBN 9781442606029.

Following her highly acclaimed A Short History of the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein now presents a unique edited collection of documents and readings. Spanning the period from c.300 to c.1500, the ambitious Reading the Middle Ages incorporates in a systematic fashion Islamic and Byzantine materials alongside Western readings.

Reading the Middle Ages is also available in two volumes for those who have a full year to teach the middle ages. These volumes split at Chapter 5, which is contained in both Volume I and Volume II.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor in the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006), Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (1999), and Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World (second edition, 2014).

Review

An omniscient host chooses her guests wisely, anticipating the intellectual riches that emerge as conversational knots dissolve and reform over the course of a soiree. Professor Rosenwein is the perfect salonniere. In this immensely satisfying collection, she has put together a body of sources that talk to each other on many different levels. Islam and Byzantium join Latin Christendom as full partners in these conversations, and canonical texts likewise rub shoulders with delightfully fresh newcomers. This collection reveals the dazzling richness of the medieval evidence and provides many points of entry for future inquiry. Dense and satisfying, Reading the Middle Ages is the ideal complement to Rosenwein's A Short History of the Middle Ages.

(Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University)

... Indispensible for anyone who wishes to approach 'the medieval West' in its global context.... The collection is very student-friendly. The prefatory materials for the sources are lucid and detailed, but not overwhelming. Students will benefit from the guide to reading primary sources, the judicious annotation, the topical index, and other ancillary materials.

(Brett Whalen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

This is a vision of medieval history for the twenty-first century. Barbara Rosenwein's selections are educational and entertaining, as she introduces her readers to mighty warriors and poor farmers, powerful kings and devout nuns, poets and lawyers, bishops and scholars. Her carefully selected and skillfully introduced sources and visual materials show that the Roman Empire gave birth not to one offspring or two siblings, but to three successor cultures: the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Islamic East.

(Claudia Rapp, UCLA)

Barbara Rosenwein's Reading the Middle Ages, a reader that accompanies her excellent Short History of the Middle Ages, masterfully combines scholarship, broad and deep, with a fine pedagogical sense. The thematic and geographical breadth represented in readings drawn from twelve centuries is balanced by keen attention to both coherence and making 'audible' individual medieval voices. Never a typicalizer or essentializer, Rosenwein has performed an extraordinary service by intertwining the experiences of a late-developing West with those of the empires, Byzantine, Islamic, Mongol, and Ottoman, that framed much of medieval history. In so doing, she has made it possible to teach easily a 'Middle Ages' that is both broader and more true.

(Cornell H. Fleischer, University of Chicago)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1551116936
• ISBN 13: 9781551116938
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 594