Medieval History Reading List

General studies of medieval history and methodology

  • Blockmans, Wim and Peter Hoppenbrouwers.  Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1550, 4th edition (Routledge, 2023).
  •  Clemens, Ray and Timothy L. Graham. An Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell, 2007)
  • Heng, Geraldene, The Global Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2021)

Paradigm Shifters: Medieval History studies that have changed the way scholars look at events, persons, ideas...

  • Abulafia, David, The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2013).
  • Bartlett, Robert. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? (Princeton, 2013).
  • Berzock, Kathleen Bickford, Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton UP, 2019).
  • 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, 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)
  • Campbell, Bruce M.  The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World (Cambridge, 2016)
  • Clanchy, Michael.  From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 3rd ed. (Wiley, 2012)
  • Farmer, Sharon.  Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender Ideology and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Cornell, 2005)
  • Green, Monica, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125 (December 2020)  
  • Heng, Geraldene.  The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (CUP, 2019)
  • Housely, Norman.  Contesting the Crusades (Blackwell, 2006)
  • Hsy, Jonathan, Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities, 2022)
  • Huizinga, Johan.  The Autumn of the Middle Ages, transl. Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1997)
  • Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957)
  • Lester, Anne.  Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Cornell, 2011)
  • McCormick, Michael Origins of the European Economy, 300-900 (Cambridge, 2001)
  • McKitterick, Rosamond.  Charlemagne: the Formation of European Identity (Cambridge, 2008)
  • Paravicini Bagliani Agostino and Neslihan Şenocak, eds. A People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050–1300 (Cornell, 2023)
  • Moore, R.I.  Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 2nd, 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)
  • Rubin, Miri.  Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: 1991)
  • 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)

Annotated Suggestions for Additional Reading