CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

Series Foreword xi
were key, but one that lasted barely two hundred years before it collapsed
and its central structures were abandoned.
In addition to their influence on the development of central features
of modern culture, the Middle Ages have long fascinated the modern age
because of parallels that exist between the two periods. In both, terrible
wars devastated whole nations and peoples; in both, incurable diseases
plagued cities and killed large percentages of the world’s population. In
both periods, dramatic social and cultural changes took place as a result
of these events: marginalized and overtaxed groups in societies rebelled
against imperious governments; trade and a burgeoning middle class came
to the fore; outside the privacy of the family, women began to have a
greater role in Western societies and their cultures.
How different cultures of that age grappled with such historical change
is the subject of the Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval
World. This series features individual volumes that illuminate key
events in medieval world history. In some cases, an “event” occurred
during a relatively limited time period. The troubadour lyric as a phenomenon,
for example, flowered and died in the courts of Aquitaine in
the twelfth century, as did the courtly romance in northern Europe a few
decades later. The Hundred Years War between France and England generally
took place during a precise time period, from the fourteenth to
mid-fifteenth centuries.
In other cases, the event may have lasted for centuries before it played
itself out: the medieval Gothic cathedral, for example, may have been
first built in the twelfth century at Saint-Denis in Paris (c. 1140), but
cathedrals, often of a slightly different style of Gothic architecture, were
still being built in the fifteenth century all over Europe and, again, as the
symbolic representation of a bishop’s seat, or chair, are still being built
today. And the medieval city, whatever its incarnation in the early
Middle Ages, basically blossomed between the eleventh and thirteenth
centuries as a result of social, economic, and cultural changes. Events—
beyond a single dramatic historically limited happening—took longer to
affect societies in the Middle Ages because of the lack of political and
social centralization, the primarily agricultural and rural nature of most
countries, difficulties in communication, and the distances between important
cultural centers.
Each volume includes necessary tools for understanding such key
events in the Middle Ages. Because of the postmodern critique of au-