Category: Medieval Studies
Format: Illustrated/Hardback
Dimension: 21,5 cms x 27 cms
Pages: 288
Price: 49 €
Year: 2012
Rights Sold: English, French, German, Russian
Signs: 522.000
Link: Link

Review

Written by jacabook

The great attraction that Middleage has resumed is surely due to interests not always relating to historical research: the fantasy, the magic, the mith, best sellers’ literature seem to have taken ‘advanced stage’. Notwithstanding, historical and archaeolgical studies of Middleage have been increased for the last years. Jaca Book has therefore asked to the most popular - also at media level - among Italian historical scholars, Franco Cardini, to do a synthesis of components and characters of the medieval society from the most recent studies, a society that unravels in the millennium from ‘400 to 1400, a period we call Middleage in Europe. Cardini’s historical synthesis tries to trace the complexity of the Medieval world presenting to the reader a extraordinary variety of elements. The Medieval paradox is the one of a Europe which has lot in common, although its plurality of peoples - with different traditions and languages - was often in war. There is a continuous of political, social, artistic, ideological and cultural koinè in the European Middleage. In the course of time from a frayed and broken world, after the fall of Roman Empire, it moved to the construction of a ecclesial and monastic textile, to the feudal court, to the towns revival, to the making of ideology, science and social components of a complex world, with a shared culture and with social differences strongly crystallized, but with moments also of large liberty. After all, a too simplified world by the contemporary point of view. Cardini’s work follows a chronological progress, but at the same time every chapter forms a typology of events, almost a genre. This allows us to grab the components of medieval society complexity during time. To political structure issues cultural and ideological factors alternate themselves with news in the ecclesial and artistic field, themes concerning women, foreigners, city-countryside relationship, knowledge transmission, etc.

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