A medieval life : Cecilia Penifader and the world of English peasants before the plague /
A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers and general readers. Like Cecilia Penifader, most peopl...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Philadelphia :
University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2021]
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| Edition: | Revised edition. |
| Series: | Middle Ages series.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers and general readers. Like Cecilia Penifader, most people in the Middle Ages were peasants, humble people living socially below the knights, bishops and kings who figure so large in history books. Judith M. Bennett shows that peasants, too, made history. She explores how peasant lives were closely entangled with the lives and interests of those more privileged, looking at manors as well as villages, parishes, faith and ritual practices, royal taxes and justice, economy and trade and famine and disease. By moving out from Cecilia's perspective, the book explores the ties and tensions that bound all medieval people, poor as well as rich, into a medieval society. The book also provides a primer on the fact-finding and interpretative debates that are at the heart of the historian's craft. Each chapter includes a new section on how medievalists today are studying such topics as puberty, morals, courtship and climate change. The illustrations, taken from the famous Luttrell Psalter, provide a coherent, rich and interpretatively complex visual program. And the final chapter explores some of the different ways in which historians, for better and for worse, have understood medieval society. |
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| Item Description: | "The current work is a revised edition of the book first published in 1998 as 'A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344'"--Title page verso. |
| Physical Description: | 196 pages : illustrations, maps, genealogical table ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780812224696 0812224698 |