What do you think?
Rate this book
Medieval People
Classic study recreates the lives of 6 ordinary people who lived between the 9th and 16th a peasant on a country estate in Charlemagne's time, a Venetian traveler of the 13th century; a prioress and a Parisian housewife of the 14th century, and a merchant and a cloth maker from the days of Henry VII.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
160 people are currently reading
1446 people want to read
About the author
Eileen Power
43 books25 followersA specialist in medieval history, Eileen Edna LePoer Power was Director of Studies in History at Girton College, University of Cambridge from 1913 until 1921, Lecturer in Political Science at the London School of Economics from 1921 until 1924, and Reader of the University of London 1924 until 1931. In 1931 she became the second woman to be appointed to the Chair of Economic History at the London School of Economics (LSE).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
Read
September 7, 2020For a long time historians foolishly imagined that kings and wars and parliaments and the jury system alone were history (p89)
In my imagination Eileen Power swept down from Northern Ireland to bring the new gospel of social history to the rich lands of southern England, but according to the infallible wikipeadia she only came from by Manchester which changes things entirely.
Medieval People was first published in 1924 and went through a series of editions before Power's death when she was, by the standards of historians, a youth of fifty and barely getting going professionally speaking. The shadow of Hitler and fascism flickers over the introduction which treats briefly of the transition from antiquity to the age of mighty Charlemagne, her comparison of Hitler to the barbarians struck me as unfair to the barbarians, though no doubt perhaps I'm more accepting of my barbarous heritage than she was of hers.
Reading Power's book what I got was a sense of historical heritage, if you can forgive the barbarous tautology done purely for the sake of a bit of alliteration. This edition had an introduction by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and he points out the influence of Power's on his work and in particular his Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. The fruit from the tree that had died by 1940 germinated in the 1970s. So we see the spread of ideas about the past from writer to reader distant in time and place.
The book has an introduction and six brief lives arranged in chronological order. Bodo - a peasant of the time of Charlemagne, Marco Polo, Chaucer's Prioress, The Menagier's wife, Thomas Betson, and Thomas Paycocke. In passing we can say that there are many more men than women - Chaucer's prioress is a distillation of her research into English priories, and the Menagier's wife - based on the book The Goodman of Paris which she herself had also kindly translated into English - tells us more about the man who write it than the woman that it was written for. Secondly if we look at the geography of those lives - northern France, Venice, England, Paris, southern England - we see Power is in the central tradition of setting up a broad corridor from England sweeping through to northern Italy as the European middle ages, Castile or Hungary or Iceland are more alien than the court of Kubai Khan in terms of imagining what was normal and what was different for Europe as a whole, but this is merely a hobby-horse of mine.
The lives are all recreated from the kinds of source material that social history has grown out of. Not the business of kings and parliaments, but wills, correspondence, the archives of Bishops, books of advice and fine manners, and the financial records of estate books. Here are the small details of everyday lives, how people worked and interacted, what concerned and preoccupied them, and who was going to get twelve schillings and sixpence after their death.
It is a gentle book designed for a reader who doesn't know anything about Marco Polo beyond that name, so gentle that I'd say the book was targeted at those whose history classes at school had been traumatic experiences perhaps those who had enjoyed 1066 and all that but for the inconvenient fact that the latter was published after Medieval people first hit the booksellers' shelves. The book shows its age in that the default historian is male, somewhat curiously considering the author's gender, but I suppose that shows the power of convention. It is far less vivid and surprising than Montailou, but then this is a book which opened a map, rather than one which recorded every journey that could be taken.
As an aside on the illustrations it has struck me recently how some medieval illustrators of the 14th and 15th centuries have a tendency to depict women of higher social standing as being extravagantly sway backed - perhaps that was the conventional idea of womanly beauty for that age?
In my imagination Eileen Power swept down from Northern Ireland to bring the new gospel of social history to the rich lands of southern England, but according to the infallible wikipeadia she only came from by Manchester which changes things entirely.
Medieval People was first published in 1924 and went through a series of editions before Power's death when she was, by the standards of historians, a youth of fifty and barely getting going professionally speaking. The shadow of Hitler and fascism flickers over the introduction which treats briefly of the transition from antiquity to the age of mighty Charlemagne, her comparison of Hitler to the barbarians struck me as unfair to the barbarians, though no doubt perhaps I'm more accepting of my barbarous heritage than she was of hers.
Reading Power's book what I got was a sense of historical heritage, if you can forgive the barbarous tautology done purely for the sake of a bit of alliteration. This edition had an introduction by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and he points out the influence of Power's on his work and in particular his Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. The fruit from the tree that had died by 1940 germinated in the 1970s. So we see the spread of ideas about the past from writer to reader distant in time and place.
The book has an introduction and six brief lives arranged in chronological order. Bodo - a peasant of the time of Charlemagne, Marco Polo, Chaucer's Prioress, The Menagier's wife, Thomas Betson, and Thomas Paycocke. In passing we can say that there are many more men than women - Chaucer's prioress is a distillation of her research into English priories, and the Menagier's wife - based on the book The Goodman of Paris which she herself had also kindly translated into English - tells us more about the man who write it than the woman that it was written for. Secondly if we look at the geography of those lives - northern France, Venice, England, Paris, southern England - we see Power is in the central tradition of setting up a broad corridor from England sweeping through to northern Italy as the European middle ages, Castile or Hungary or Iceland are more alien than the court of Kubai Khan in terms of imagining what was normal and what was different for Europe as a whole, but this is merely a hobby-horse of mine.
The lives are all recreated from the kinds of source material that social history has grown out of. Not the business of kings and parliaments, but wills, correspondence, the archives of Bishops, books of advice and fine manners, and the financial records of estate books. Here are the small details of everyday lives, how people worked and interacted, what concerned and preoccupied them, and who was going to get twelve schillings and sixpence after their death.
It is a gentle book designed for a reader who doesn't know anything about Marco Polo beyond that name, so gentle that I'd say the book was targeted at those whose history classes at school had been traumatic experiences perhaps those who had enjoyed 1066 and all that but for the inconvenient fact that the latter was published after Medieval people first hit the booksellers' shelves. The book shows its age in that the default historian is male, somewhat curiously considering the author's gender, but I suppose that shows the power of convention. It is far less vivid and surprising than Montailou, but then this is a book which opened a map, rather than one which recorded every journey that could be taken.
As an aside on the illustrations it has struck me recently how some medieval illustrators of the 14th and 15th centuries have a tendency to depict women of higher social standing as being extravagantly sway backed - perhaps that was the conventional idea of womanly beauty for that age?
October 5, 2010
The problem with owning an e-reader is that you don’t get that closure of money changing hands. You just click through Amazon, pressing the One Click Buy button with impunity while your credit card quietly sobs in your wallet. In an attempt to limit the damage on my bank account, I went through Amazon’s free Kindle books and picked up Eileen Edna Power’s Medieval People.
Power’s book follows six medieval lives based entirely on literature (in this case, wills, poems, and contemporary observations) beginning at the fall of the Roman Empire. Most, if not all, of her information is culled from primary sources, which she cites copiously throughout the book. Based on this information, Power constructs the real life conditions and actions of peasants, housewives, abbesses, merchants, and explorers.
The individual sketches are interesting, but suffer from language that borders of the painfully purple. Power has a tendency to gush, especially over her male subjects. One man, Thomas Betson, is described as perhaps the epitome of romantic manhood based almost entirely on the love letters he wrote to his preteen fiancé. I’m not making a comment on May-December arranged marriages in the Middle Ages, but of Power’s starry-eyed conclusions that surely a man who wrote letters such as these could do no wrong. I don’t want to cast aspersions at Power’s scholarship—she obviously scoured crumbling documents that most regular people have never seen. Instead, I might say that her language and outlook might have something to do with the era in which the book was written. Originally published in 1924, the book may have been trying to evoke a feeling of simpler times, something that people must have longed for in the years between the two World Wars. If this is so, it probably served its purpose.
If you’re still interested in this book, I would suggest finding a hard copy. While the free Kindle version is certainly readable, it’s missing all of the images that probably make the book truly come alive. Though I found parts eye-rollingly painful to read, I will keep this book in my Kindle if only to refer to the primary sources contained within.
Power’s book follows six medieval lives based entirely on literature (in this case, wills, poems, and contemporary observations) beginning at the fall of the Roman Empire. Most, if not all, of her information is culled from primary sources, which she cites copiously throughout the book. Based on this information, Power constructs the real life conditions and actions of peasants, housewives, abbesses, merchants, and explorers.
The individual sketches are interesting, but suffer from language that borders of the painfully purple. Power has a tendency to gush, especially over her male subjects. One man, Thomas Betson, is described as perhaps the epitome of romantic manhood based almost entirely on the love letters he wrote to his preteen fiancé. I’m not making a comment on May-December arranged marriages in the Middle Ages, but of Power’s starry-eyed conclusions that surely a man who wrote letters such as these could do no wrong. I don’t want to cast aspersions at Power’s scholarship—she obviously scoured crumbling documents that most regular people have never seen. Instead, I might say that her language and outlook might have something to do with the era in which the book was written. Originally published in 1924, the book may have been trying to evoke a feeling of simpler times, something that people must have longed for in the years between the two World Wars. If this is so, it probably served its purpose.
If you’re still interested in this book, I would suggest finding a hard copy. While the free Kindle version is certainly readable, it’s missing all of the images that probably make the book truly come alive. Though I found parts eye-rollingly painful to read, I will keep this book in my Kindle if only to refer to the primary sources contained within.
October 23, 2012
When I picked up this book and looked at the title and the cover, I did not expect that I was really going to enjoy reading it; it looked like it was going to be really boring and badly written. I was surprised when I started reading and realized that the style of writing was unlike most history books that I've read before, combining a narrative-style glimpse into the thoughts and opinions of the people featured in the book, and also plenty of factual information about their life and times. It outlined and detailed the fall of the Roman Empire, and the daily lives of a Frankish peasant, a Parisian housewife, a wool merchant and a fuller (who oversaw the production of wool), each from varying times within the Middle Ages. It also provides an account of some of Marco Polo's travels that described the greatness of Venice as well as other world ports, and the methods of transportation and the relationships between the Mongols and European society. Each of these chapters goes into detail, using quotes from historical text, both famous and obscure, including poetry from Chaucer, Le Ménagier de Paris, and letters and journal entries written by the subjects themselves. The use of these texts from the actual time period really told me what people thought about those times, and their opinions on their own lives and livelihoods as well as those of others around them. Not only does Medieval People provide a deep, informative view of the lives of people in the Middle Ages, but it does this in an accessible and uniquely omniscient manner that explores the opinions of the majority, not just the rich and powerful. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a book of history from which they will learn a lot and that they will enjoy reading.
March 19, 2024
Probably outdated now. But it was one of the first overviews of "ordinary" life in the Middle Ages, from the perspective of common people.
February 9, 2018
Written at a time when, in the author's words, "historians imagined that kings and wars and parliaments and the jury system alone were history", Eileen Power's landmark study in social history sought to turn the focus instead upon the lives of relatively ordinary people.
Drawing on a range of primary sources including letters, wills, and ecclesiastical records she examines the life of six individuals: a peasant at the time of Charlemagne, Marco Polo the Venetian adventurer, a Prioress who might have been a model for Chaucer's Madame Elglentyne, a fourteenth century Parisian housewife, a fifteenth-century English wool merchant, and an Essex clothier in the reign of Henry VII.
Apart from a determination to ferret out material from some fairly dark corners, what Eileen Power primarily brings to her subject is human sympathy. She considers the relationships between the partners in dynastic marriages. She unearths friendships between merchants. She tells us about the meals that housewives cooked, the pets that nuns smuggled into chapel, and the charms that ploughmen muttered when their cattle were sick
Authoritative but readable, Medieval People puts the reader in close proximity to the individuals who navigated the shifting cultural landscapes of Europe in the middle ages.
Drawing on a range of primary sources including letters, wills, and ecclesiastical records she examines the life of six individuals: a peasant at the time of Charlemagne, Marco Polo the Venetian adventurer, a Prioress who might have been a model for Chaucer's Madame Elglentyne, a fourteenth century Parisian housewife, a fifteenth-century English wool merchant, and an Essex clothier in the reign of Henry VII.
Apart from a determination to ferret out material from some fairly dark corners, what Eileen Power primarily brings to her subject is human sympathy. She considers the relationships between the partners in dynastic marriages. She unearths friendships between merchants. She tells us about the meals that housewives cooked, the pets that nuns smuggled into chapel, and the charms that ploughmen muttered when their cattle were sick
Authoritative but readable, Medieval People puts the reader in close proximity to the individuals who navigated the shifting cultural landscapes of Europe in the middle ages.
January 15, 2020
Secilen kisilerin hayatlarindan damitilanlarin ortacagin gunluk yasamina dair nefis bilgiler vermesini saglayan kitabin cevirisi ve dipnotlari ozene yazilmis. Dil yalin, uslup akici.
Alanla ilgili olmayan insanlar da sikilmadan, keyifle okuyabilirler.
Alanla ilgili olmayan insanlar da sikilmadan, keyifle okuyabilirler.
March 11, 2018
“La storia vale in quanto è viva”
Sono parole di Eileen Power che in questo libricino di neanche 200 pagine racchiude le vite di sei persone più o meno comuni del Medioevo, sei "bozzetti", come li definisce lei, che pulsano di vita vera.
Chi ai tempi delle superiori avesse avuto un impatto traumatico con il Medioevo potrebbe ricredersi, lasciarsi attirare e magari diventare un appassionato di questa epoca; l'opera si adatta sia ai neofiti che ai più eruditi per la capacità dell'autrice di rendere vive persone e luoghi lontani centinaia di anni partendo da piccole cose, abitudini, usanze.
Il testo si discosta dalla storiografia classica legata agli atti ufficiali, alla politica, all'economia e attinge da documenti rari, testamenti, note spesa, iscrizioni tombali, toponomastica, storia del costume, documenti ecclesiastici e opere di letteratura tra Chaucer, Boccaccio e Marco Polo alternando la narrazione con lievi digressioni da pettegolezzo che rendono leggera e scorrevole la lettura di un'opera che, in fondo, è un saggio ben strutturato e ricco di informazioni.
La pecca, costante nei saggi soprattutto in edizione economica, è la mancanza di supoporti visivi, immagini e illustrazioni che rendano ancora più vivo il racconto.
Provo io qui a sopperire a tale mancanza ripercorrendo la strada di una lettrice che non si accontenta del solo testo scritto e che desidera sprofondare nella vita nel Medioevo con più sensi. Mi si perdonerà la digressione sul Tittivillus, non ho saputo resistere.
https://marmott79.blogspot.it/2018/03...
Sono parole di Eileen Power che in questo libricino di neanche 200 pagine racchiude le vite di sei persone più o meno comuni del Medioevo, sei "bozzetti", come li definisce lei, che pulsano di vita vera.
Chi ai tempi delle superiori avesse avuto un impatto traumatico con il Medioevo potrebbe ricredersi, lasciarsi attirare e magari diventare un appassionato di questa epoca; l'opera si adatta sia ai neofiti che ai più eruditi per la capacità dell'autrice di rendere vive persone e luoghi lontani centinaia di anni partendo da piccole cose, abitudini, usanze.
Il testo si discosta dalla storiografia classica legata agli atti ufficiali, alla politica, all'economia e attinge da documenti rari, testamenti, note spesa, iscrizioni tombali, toponomastica, storia del costume, documenti ecclesiastici e opere di letteratura tra Chaucer, Boccaccio e Marco Polo alternando la narrazione con lievi digressioni da pettegolezzo che rendono leggera e scorrevole la lettura di un'opera che, in fondo, è un saggio ben strutturato e ricco di informazioni.
La pecca, costante nei saggi soprattutto in edizione economica, è la mancanza di supoporti visivi, immagini e illustrazioni che rendano ancora più vivo il racconto.
Provo io qui a sopperire a tale mancanza ripercorrendo la strada di una lettrice che non si accontenta del solo testo scritto e che desidera sprofondare nella vita nel Medioevo con più sensi. Mi si perdonerà la digressione sul Tittivillus, non ho saputo resistere.
https://marmott79.blogspot.it/2018/03...
June 9, 2024
Power blends pioneering social history and old-fashioned romantic biography. Today, it seems charmingly childish.
May 23, 2017
This book is just okay. It's informative, and some of the stories are interesting. I like Power's conceit of keeping from the politics that everyone else usually focused on when writing histories and choosing to focus on the individual instead. I like her organizing principle of each chapter being about a different historical person and therefore about a different type of Medieval person. She writes about the peasant, the clothier, the traveler (Marco Polo!), the middle class housewife, the nun, and the wool seller. She has a great opening chapter about the decline of Rome and the shift from the Classical time period to the Medieval period. Power is clearly intelligent, knows her history and her literature, and is passionate about her subject matter, even quoting from Ecclesiasticus: "Let us now praise famous men..."
I'm not sure who Power's intended audience is. I don't like that she quotes extensively from her primary sources. For me, as a literature major who used primary and secondary sources in long-ish papers, extensively quoting is clunky and renders your attempt at recreating/telling pointless. As a scholar, the point of researching and compiling, I thought, is to present your views and your findings in your words. Power's extensive quoting really got in the way of my enjoyment of her book. My dad agreed with me that she should have paraphrased more and left the primary sources to those who want to read them. I also didn't understand her overuse of Chaucer. Yes, the poet sheds lights on reality and truth, but Chaucer's poems are not fact. They're not primary sources of people's lives back then, yet Power relied on his descriptions to fill in gaps left by the primary sources. I found it very annoying, especially because she doesn't translate the Middle English. Reading this book aloud to my dad was extremely frustrating. I was trying to translate all the Middle English and decipher the original (and unregulated) spellings, and by the end of the book, I gave up on reading the direct quotes from the poems I knew I wouldn't be able to understand 100% of.
Maybe history writing was different in the 1920s. More people knew French, and maybe, more people knew Middle English, but I doubt it, and I get the sense that Power's intended audience is not popular but scholarly. If that's the case, it's a good source for information and a good guide to primary sources. If it's meant for other established historians, it's a good tip--focus on more than "just" politics, and let the "regular people" and their everyday lives have their time also.
Finally, I can't recommend this book. It was informative and well-written, but it's not all interesting. Parts are, and maybe some would find those parts worth it. I would rather read a book by Harold Lamb, who at least makes his histories of people and their everyday lives interesting and in his own words.
I'm not sure who Power's intended audience is. I don't like that she quotes extensively from her primary sources. For me, as a literature major who used primary and secondary sources in long-ish papers, extensively quoting is clunky and renders your attempt at recreating/telling pointless. As a scholar, the point of researching and compiling, I thought, is to present your views and your findings in your words. Power's extensive quoting really got in the way of my enjoyment of her book. My dad agreed with me that she should have paraphrased more and left the primary sources to those who want to read them. I also didn't understand her overuse of Chaucer. Yes, the poet sheds lights on reality and truth, but Chaucer's poems are not fact. They're not primary sources of people's lives back then, yet Power relied on his descriptions to fill in gaps left by the primary sources. I found it very annoying, especially because she doesn't translate the Middle English. Reading this book aloud to my dad was extremely frustrating. I was trying to translate all the Middle English and decipher the original (and unregulated) spellings, and by the end of the book, I gave up on reading the direct quotes from the poems I knew I wouldn't be able to understand 100% of.
Maybe history writing was different in the 1920s. More people knew French, and maybe, more people knew Middle English, but I doubt it, and I get the sense that Power's intended audience is not popular but scholarly. If that's the case, it's a good source for information and a good guide to primary sources. If it's meant for other established historians, it's a good tip--focus on more than "just" politics, and let the "regular people" and their everyday lives have their time also.
Finally, I can't recommend this book. It was informative and well-written, but it's not all interesting. Parts are, and maybe some would find those parts worth it. I would rather read a book by Harold Lamb, who at least makes his histories of people and their everyday lives interesting and in his own words.
November 9, 2022
說起來，上海三聯也是一間奇怪的出版社，默默的出這套經典人文書庫，品質不甚穩定，也不宣傳，就這樣放著等人去挖。不過它的確是有機會發現不錯作品的，就像這本《中世紀的人們》。
本書作者Eileen Edna LePoer Power，(艾琳‧帕瓦)，活躍於十九世紀末、二十世紀初的經濟史家，但她實際上較為人知的是在社會文化，特別是“底層大眾”的研究成果上。《中世紀的人們》就是她的成名之作，1924年發行以來再版、翻譯成各種語言，歷久不衰。
現在我們這個時代對於社會文化的研究，不論東西方都早已充斥，許多普及作品也都如雨後春筍般的問世，但這在一個世紀前卻還是有待關注的空曠領域。艾琳‧帕瓦無疑就是其中的先驅，她在本書前言即大聲疾呼：「驅動歷史前進沒有底層大眾的努力是難以想像的，至今持續的忽略它們更是一種愚昧無知！」她以身體力行，撰寫這本以中世紀社會各階層職業做代表，描繪出當時人們生活圖景的小書，引起大家的關注。艾琳在農民、旅行家、修女、主婦、商人之中各挑選了一個真實或代表人物，運用任何可得的史料，從正面或側寫，告訴讀者他們在所屬的時代是如何扮演自己的角色。
我個人印象較深的是，她在旅行家部分選擇了著名的馬可‧波羅，並認為此人之所以沒有在遊記中提到長城跟裹小腳，純粹是因為他站在太“上層”的角度去觀察，所以可能忽略掉了一些事情，又或者是，出於人類記憶的限制，馬可只是不小心忘記了而已。另外一個更有意思的是主婦的部分，愛琳引用的是一個資產階級丈夫寫給妻子的“守則”，裡面講述了做為一個“有教養的賢妻”的所有必備技能跟禮儀，撇開什麼女權之類的不談，如果拿來個中國宋代以後關於女性的規範比較，應該可以得到更多發現。而且愛琳指出，由於那對夫妻是老少配，丈夫知道自己必定死在妻子前頭，但他“不希望妻子嫁給下一個老公時依然無知的像個新婦”，所以才會教育她。但作者又說“其實大部分的丈夫還是希望妻子能夠守貞，雖然大多是不可能...”這段還頗令人莞爾。
中文版引用的是之後的修訂本，作者的同事在艾琳過世後把她一些有關的文章整理後，也編入新版中，做為補充，所以多了第一章“先驅者”。這是艾琳編寫的，關於羅馬帝國崩潰前的四至六世紀的高層眾生相。雖然這不符合本書的宗旨，但本來要求那段史料匱乏的年代，撰寫一份詳細的底層生活史就是苛求，這幾篇被收錄的原因，是作者的觀點仍然放在“生活”的方面，並與當時的大環境連結，做出宏觀的結論，這種“以小觀大”的眼光令人稱道。
這個補充的第一章的主旨，在於點出，羅馬帝國晚期，整個國家社會都處於逐漸衰退階段，但觀察當時的上層結構的人們，卻依然醉生夢死，夜夜笙歌，彷彿這一切都與他們無關。過去的那種公共精神已經是明日黃花，從精神上死亡的貴族也預示了帝國的無可救藥。而艾林撰寫這篇時，正值三零年代歐洲風起雲湧的時刻，當時法西斯橫行，英、法面對希特勒只能姑息養奸的“綏靖”，作者直斥這種“不作為”也是一種罪惡。她舉羅馬崩潰的故事，無疑是用來警醒當時的社會大眾，可惜卻被忽略。而對艾琳來說最遺憾的，大概是她沒有活著看到大戰結束吧。她的警告放在今日依然有用，也有許多學者做出跟她一樣的判斷，但你“永遠無法叫醒一個裝睡的人”。歷史唯一教導我們的是，我們永遠無法從中學到教訓。
初讀這本書，我聯想到的是另外一位女性史家芭芭拉‧W‧塔奇曼，她的作品近來大量的引進華文界，無疑是個好消息。而艾琳做為前輩，個人認為她在整理史料的能力跟幽默感顯然是略顯遜色，本書中後兩、三個篇章比較過於瑣碎跟枯燥，有點可惜。但不管怎樣，這本《中世紀的人們》依然是個值得一讀的作品，如果你特別喜歡這個主題的話。
本書作者Eileen Edna LePoer Power，(艾琳‧帕瓦)，活躍於十九世紀末、二十世紀初的經濟史家，但她實際上較為人知的是在社會文化，特別是“底層大眾”的研究成果上。《中世紀的人們》就是她的成名之作，1924年發行以來再版、翻譯成各種語言，歷久不衰。
現在我們這個時代對於社會文化的研究，不論東西方都早已充斥，許多普及作品也都如雨後春筍般的問世，但這在一個世紀前卻還是有待關注的空曠領域。艾琳‧帕瓦無疑就是其中的先驅，她在本書前言即大聲疾呼：「驅動歷史前進沒有底層大眾的努力是難以想像的，至今持續的忽略它們更是一種愚昧無知！」她以身體力行，撰寫這本以中世紀社會各階層職業做代表，描繪出當時人們生活圖景的小書，引起大家的關注。艾琳在農民、旅行家、修女、主婦、商人之中各挑選了一個真實或代表人物，運用任何可得的史料，從正面或側寫，告訴讀者他們在所屬的時代是如何扮演自己的角色。
我個人印象較深的是，她在旅行家部分選擇了著名的馬可‧波羅，並認為此人之所以沒有在遊記中提到長城跟裹小腳，純粹是因為他站在太“上層”的角度去觀察，所以可能忽略掉了一些事情，又或者是，出於人類記憶的限制，馬可只是不小心忘記了而已。另外一個更有意思的是主婦的部分，愛琳引用的是一個資產階級丈夫寫給妻子的“守則”，裡面講述了做為一個“有教養的賢妻”的所有必備技能跟禮儀，撇開什麼女權之類的不談，如果拿來個中國宋代以後關於女性的規範比較，應該可以得到更多發現。而且愛琳指出，由於那對夫妻是老少配，丈夫知道自己必定死在妻子前頭，但他“不希望妻子嫁給下一個老公時依然無知的像個新婦”，所以才會教育她。但作者又說“其實大部分的丈夫還是希望妻子能夠守貞，雖然大多是不可能...”這段還頗令人莞爾。
中文版引用的是之後的修訂本，作者的同事在艾琳過世後把她一些有關的文章整理後，也編入新版中，做為補充，所以多了第一章“先驅者”。這是艾琳編寫的，關於羅馬帝國崩潰前的四至六世紀的高層眾生相。雖然這不符合本書的宗旨，但本來要求那段史料匱乏的年代，撰寫一份詳細的底層生活史就是苛求，這幾篇被收錄的原因，是作者的觀點仍然放在“生活”的方面，並與當時的大環境連結，做出宏觀的結論，這種“以小觀大”的眼光令人稱道。
這個補充的第一章的主旨，在於點出，羅馬帝國晚期，整個國家社會都處於逐漸衰退階段，但觀察當時的上層結構的人們，卻依然醉生夢死，夜夜笙歌，彷彿這一切都與他們無關。過去的那種公共精神已經是明日黃花，從精神上死亡的貴族也預示了帝國的無可救藥。而艾林撰寫這篇時，正值三零年代歐洲風起雲湧的時刻，當時法西斯橫行，英、法面對希特勒只能姑息養奸的“綏靖”，作者直斥這種“不作為”也是一種罪惡。她舉羅馬崩潰的故事，無疑是用來警醒當時的社會大眾，可惜卻被忽略。而對艾琳來說最遺憾的，大概是她沒有活著看到大戰結束吧。她的警告放在今日依然有用，也有許多學者做出跟她一樣的判斷，但你“永遠無法叫醒一個裝睡的人”。歷史唯一教導我們的是，我們永遠無法從中學到教訓。
初讀這本書，我聯想到的是另外一位女性史家芭芭拉‧W‧塔奇曼，她的作品近來大量的引進華文界，無疑是個好消息。而艾琳做為前輩，個人認為她在整理史料的能力跟幽默感顯然是略顯遜色，本書中後兩、三個篇章比較過於瑣碎跟枯燥，有點可惜。但不管怎樣，這本《中世紀的人們》依然是個值得一讀的作品，如果你特別喜歡這個主題的話。
December 19, 2020
This is a rather old book published posthumously during WWII by Eileen Power who studied nunneries as well as the lives of common people during the Middle Ages. I really liked her writing style and found that she made the characters really come alive. Particularly, her description of Marco Polo blew me away and gave me a bad rash of wanderlust. Having read current research into the medieval period (Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 having pointed me to her book), I don't think that her work has really suffered in the 80-odd years that have passed since she wrote it. Highly recommended.
December 29, 2020
Türklere hakaret eden ve günah yuvası Küffar avrupayı anlatan kitaba tek yıldızı bastık hamdolsun.
YAŞASIN IRKIMIZ
ÇİNE BEDEL KIRKIMIZ
SÖYLENİR TÜRKÜMÜZ
ÇAĞLARDAN ÇAĞLARA!
YAŞASIN IRKIMIZ
ÇİNE BEDEL KIRKIMIZ
SÖYLENİR TÜRKÜMÜZ
ÇAĞLARDAN ÇAĞLARA!
August 4, 2008
Rather dated now across the board: simplistic arguments, childlike prose ( "They were very merry and not at all refined." In stead of elucidating the social world of the 8th century Frankish peasant, comments such as this turn them into little more than Hobbits with their penchant for Maypoles and strong ale) and medieval stereotypes abound.
September 13, 2009
A somewhat less than satisfying look at some real people from the Middle Ages based on documents and letters. Maybe I was expecting more than could possibly be reconstructed from the source material. Nonethless, interesting insights into how things were -- especially trade, travel and finance.
August 7, 2014
This is a social history book which is written for the layman and counts no more than 160 pages in my edition. In this short space, Power provides a vivid taste of life across many sub-epochs of the medieval age. The chapters, progressing chronologically, are deliberately concerned with chiefly one historical document. From this one document she describes the living persons that the document concerns; the recipient of a guide to good housewifery in the late 14th Century, the Frankish peasant farmer who Charlemagne's detailed tithe records names; the nun who was the inspiration for Chaucer's Eglentyne; Marco Polo, as recorded by his own words, and so on.
The early medieval empire of Charlemagne in the late 8th/ early-9th century is represented by "Bodo," whose whole family had to be hard-working to meet the quotas of the demanding boss, the steward of the "seignorial land" of the "fisc" of "the lands of the Abbey of St Germain" that Bodo happened to live on. But on the special occasions that Bodo did not need all day to farm the land, he could give his familiy the treat of visiting the travelling fairs, in which they could see clues to the wider world:
The chapter following the real Madame Eglentyne of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales distinguishes her, the object of an historian's imagination, from the product of a literary critic's symbolic decyphering:
And life in the nunneries and monastries is presented with the humdrum humour and humanity which is left out of the picture in the cliched imagination:
Powers describes how the young nuns and monks were only human, after all, and how far from ideal they could fall. My favourite part of this chapter is the mention of the "special Devil called Tittuvillus" who was created to warn slackers from cutting corners in the services:
Powers opens the chapter on marital relations with the fake epigraph: "The sphere of woman is the home --Homo Sapiens" but she is nonethless charmed by the document from the late-14th century; which is an early example of Conduct Literature for women. Despite being on the face of it an exhaustive and exhausting set of rules for the busy wife in the home, Power finds the emotional currents that lie under the form of the text and must first come after we dissolve our modern unfamiliarity with its intentions:
Power quotes at length the manual, which is indeed, in spite of its instructive tone, an openhearted and thoughtful reflection on home comfort and cohabitation. The Ménagier seemed to perceive that childhood was, in general, an oppressive experience for most men, or at least one which cannot compare to the loving attentions of a lover - regardless of the material wealth that such a match brings, and that would better appease the parents:
Power also translates parts of the manual which advise the tone with which a good housewife should administer to her servants. It is clear that stories of houses ruined by disobedient servants and doormat masters inspired a high awareness of the need for some skills similar to modern "human resources" departments:
Power introduces the chapter on the merchant Thomas Betson by asking us to forget the industrial importance of iron and cotton, and to remember the great wealth "grown on the backs" of our own cattle:
The wool trade was not tightly regulated, and it seems that there existed a sense of mutual enrichment, rather than explotations, between the producers of the raw wool and those who made it into the finished product:
The will of a Thomas Paycocke also shows a generosity of spirit:
Power then speculates in what manner Paycocke's industry was set out. It surprised me that industrial unrest had significant precusors in the late-medieval economy:
Short though it is, this is a extremely rich book, and for me shone some spotlights onto an overwhelmingly large area of darkness. It's human approach helps the imagination along in building bridges from our modern mindset to the ones of our ancestors. The book presumes a knowledge of French and middle English, but does not quote these sources often.
The early medieval empire of Charlemagne in the late 8th/ early-9th century is represented by "Bodo," whose whole family had to be hard-working to meet the quotas of the demanding boss, the steward of the "seignorial land" of the "fisc" of "the lands of the Abbey of St Germain" that Bodo happened to live on. But on the special occasions that Bodo did not need all day to farm the land, he could give his familiy the treat of visiting the travelling fairs, in which they could see clues to the wider world:
Bodo and Ermentrude and the three children, all attired in their best, did not consider it a waste of time to go to the fair even twice or three times. They pretended that they wanted to buy salt to salt down their winter meat, or some vermillion dye to colour a frock for the baby. What they really wanted was to wander along the little rows of booths and look at all the strange things assembled there [...] Frankish nobles bargained there for purple and silken robes with orange borders, stamped leather jerkins, peacock's feathers, and the scarlet plumage of flamingos (which they called "phoenix skins"), scents and pearls and spices, almonds and raisins, and monkeys for their wives to play with [...] And Bodo would hear a hundred dialects and tongues ,for men of Saxony and Frisia, Spain and Provence, Rouen and Lombardy, and perhaps an Englishman or two, jostled each other in the little streets [...] Then there were always jugglers and tumblers, and men with performing bears, and minstrels to wheedle Bodo's few pence out of his pocket. And it would be a very tired and happy family that trundled home in the cart to bed. For it is not, after all, so dull in the kitchen, and when we have quite finished with the emporor "Charlemagne and all his peerage," it is really worth while to spend a few moments with Bodo in his little manse. History is largely made up of Bodos. p.32-3
The chapter following the real Madame Eglentyne of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales distinguishes her, the object of an historian's imagination, from the product of a literary critic's symbolic decyphering:
Everyone knows Chaucer's description of the Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, who rode with that very motley and talkative company on the way to Canterbury. There is no portrait in his gallery which has risen to more diverse comment among critics. One interprets it as a cutting attack on the worldliness of the Church; another thinks that Chaucer meant to draw a charming and sympathetic picture of womanly gentleness; one says that it is a caricature, another an ideal; and an American professor even finds in it a psychological study of thwarted maternal instinct, apparently because Madame Eglentyne was fond of little dogs and told a story about a schoolboy. The mere historian may be excused from following these vageries. To him, Chaucer's Prioress, like Chaucer's monk and Chaucer's friar, will simply be one more instance of the almost photographic acccuracy of the poet's observation. [...] the most subtle kind of satire, which does not depend upon exaggeration. The literary critic has only Chaucer's words and his own heart, or sometimes, low it be spoken, his own desire to be original, by which to guide his judgment. But the historian knows; he has all sorts of historical sources in which to study nunneries, and there he meets Chaucer's Prioress at every turn. p.69
And life in the nunneries and monastries is presented with the humdrum humour and humanity which is left out of the picture in the cliched imagination:
A story is told about a priest in Worcestershire, who was kept awake all night by the people dancing in his churchyard, and singing a song with the refrain "Sweetheart have pity," so that he could not get it out of his head, and the next morning at Mass, instead of saying "Dominus vobiscum," he said "Sweetheart have pity," and there was a dreadful scandal which got into a chronicle. Sometimes our Bodo did not dance himself but listened to the songs of wandering minstrels. The priests did not at all approve of these minstrels, who (they said) would certanly go to hell for singing profane secular songs, all about the great deeds of heathen heros of the Frankish race, instead of Christian hymns. But Bodo loved them, and so did Bodo's betters; the Church councils had sometimes even to rebuke abbots and abesses for listening to their songs. And worst of it was that the great emporor himself, the good Charlemagne, loved them too. p,26
Powers describes how the young nuns and monks were only human, after all, and how far from ideal they could fall. My favourite part of this chapter is the mention of the "special Devil called Tittuvillus" who was created to warn slackers from cutting corners in the services:
So prevalent was the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a special Devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big bag. In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who generally had a sharp eye for devils. One Latin rhyme distinguishes carefully betwee nthe contents of his sack: "THere are they who wickedly corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner and the over-leaper: Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's words." [...] Tittivullus used to fill up odd corners of his sack with the idle talk of people who gossiped in church; and he also sat up aloft and collected all the high notes of vain tenors who sang to their own glory instead of to the glory of God... p.78-9
The nuns, of course, would not have been human if they had not sometimes grown a little weary of all these services and this silence; for the religious life was not, nor was it intended to be, an easy one. It was not a mere means of escape from work and responsibility. In the early golden age of monasticism only men and women with a vocation, that is to say a real genius for monastic life, entered convents. [...] The basis of wise St. Benedict's RUle was a nicely adjusted combination of variety with regularity; for he knew human nature. Thus monks and nuns did not find the services monotonous, and indeed regarded them as by far the best part of the day. But in the later Middle Ages, when Chaucer lived, young people had begun to enter monastic houses rather as a profession than as a vocation [...] little suited to monastic life, and who lowered its standard. because it was hard and uncongenial to them. Eglentyne became a nun because her father did not want the trouble and expense of finding her a husband, and because being a nun was about the only career for a well-born lady who did not marry. [...]The early tradition of learning had died out and many nuns could hardly understand the Latin in which their services were written. The result was that monastic life began to lose that essential variety which St. Benedict had designed for it [...] and the series of services degenerated into a mere routine of peculiar monotony, which many of the singers could no longer keep alive with spiritual fervour [...] became empty forms, to be hurried though with scant devotion and occasionally with scandolous irreverence [...] though the monks were always worse about it than the nuns. Sometimes they "cut" the services. Sometimes they behaved with the utmost levity, as at Exeter in 1330, where the canons gigled and joked and quarrelled during the services and dropped hot candle wax from the upper stalls on to the shaven heads of the singers in the stalls below! p.76-7
Powers opens the chapter on marital relations with the fake epigraph: "The sphere of woman is the home --Homo Sapiens" but she is nonethless charmed by the document from the late-14th century; which is an early example of Conduct Literature for women. Despite being on the face of it an exhaustive and exhausting set of rules for the busy wife in the home, Power finds the emotional currents that lie under the form of the text and must first come after we dissolve our modern unfamiliarity with its intentions:
The greater part of the Ménagier´s book is concerned however not with the theoretical niceties of wifely submission, but with his creature comforts. His instructions as to how to make a husband comfortable positiviely palpitate with life; and at the same time there is something indescribably homely and touching about them; they tell more about the real life of a burgess´s wife than a hundred tales of Patient Griselda or of Jehanne la Quentine. Consider this picture (how typical a product of the masculine imagination!) of the stout bread-winner, buffeted about in all weathers and amid all discomforts, nobly pursuing the task of earning his living, and fortified by the recollection of a domesticated little wife, darning his stocking at home by the fire, and prepared to lavish her attentions on the weary hero in the evening. p.101
Power quotes at length the manual, which is indeed, in spite of its instructive tone, an openhearted and thoughtful reflection on home comfort and cohabitation. The Ménagier seemed to perceive that childhood was, in general, an oppressive experience for most men, or at least one which cannot compare to the loving attentions of a lover - regardless of the material wealth that such a match brings, and that would better appease the parents:
It is certain that when fathers and mothers be dead, and stepfathers and stepmothers argue with their stepsons, and scold them and repulse them, and take not thought for their sleeping, nor for their food and drink, their hose and their shirts and all their other needs and affairs, and the same children find elsewhere a good home and good counsel from some other woman, who receives them and takes thought to warm them with some poor gruel with her and to give them a bed and keep them tidy, mending their hosen, breeches, shirts and other garments, then those lads cleave to her and desire to be with her, and to sleep warm between her breasts, and are altogether estranged from their mothers and fathers, who before took no heed of them and now want to get them back and have them again. [...]Then the parents lament and weep and say that these same women have bewitched their children and that they are spellbound and cannot leave, but are never easy save when they are with their enchantresses. But whatever may be said of it, it is no witchcraft, but it is by reason of the love, the care, the intimacies, joys and pleasures, which these women do in all ways unto the lads, and on my soul there is no other enchantment. p.102
Power also translates parts of the manual which advise the tone with which a good housewife should administer to her servants. It is clear that stories of houses ruined by disobedient servants and doormat masters inspired a high awareness of the need for some skills similar to modern "human resources" departments:
If you find from the report of her master and mistress, neighbours and others that a girl is what you need, find out from her, and cause Master John to register in his account book, the day on which you engage her, her name and those of her father, other, and any of her kinsfolk, the place where they live and her birthplace and her references. For servants will be more afraid to do wrong if they know that you are recording all these things and that if they leave you without permission, or are guilty of any offense, you will write and complain to the justice of their country or to their friends. And notwithstanding bear in mind the saying of the philosopher called Bertrand the Old, who says that if you engage a maid or man of high and proud answers, yo ushall know that when she leaves she will miscall you if she can; and if, on the contrary, she be flattering and full of blandishments, trust her not, for she is in league with someone else to trick you; but if she blushes and is silent and shamefast when you correct her, love her as your daughter. p.105
As soon as they begin to tell stories, or to argue, or to lean on their elbows, order the béguine to make them rise and take away their table, for he common folk have a saying: "when a varlet holds forth at table and a horse grazes in the ditch, it is time to take them away, for they have had their fill." p.106
Power introduces the chapter on the merchant Thomas Betson by asking us to forget the industrial importance of iron and cotton, and to remember the great wealth "grown on the backs" of our own cattle:
The visitor to the House of Lords, looking respectfully upon that august assembly, cannot fail to be struck by a stout and ungainly object facing the throne - an ungainly object upon which in gull session of Parliament, he will observe seated the Lord Chancellor of England. The object is a wollsack, and it is stuffed as full of pure history as the office of Lord Chancellor itself. For it reminds a cotton-spinning, iron-working generation that the greatness of England was built upon, not upon the flimsy plant which comes to her to be manufactured from the Far East and West of the world, nor upon the harsh metal delved from her bowels, but upon the wool which generation after generation has grown on the backs of her black-faced sheet. First in the form of a raw material sought after eagerly by all the clothmakers of Europe, then in the form of a manufacture carried on in her own towns and villages, and sent out far and wide in ships, wool was the foundation of England's greatness right up to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when cotton and iron took its place. [...] The Lord Chancellor of England is seated upon a woolsack because it was upon a woolsack that this fair land rose to prosperity. p.116
The wool trade was not tightly regulated, and it seems that there existed a sense of mutual enrichment, rather than explotations, between the producers of the raw wool and those who made it into the finished product:
Midwinter, Busshe, and Elmes were all wool dealer, or "broggers" - middle-men, that is to say, between the framers who grew and the staplers who bought wool, but often the staplers dealt directly with individual farmers, buying the small man's clip as well as the great man's, and warm friendships sprang from the annual visits, looked forward to in Yorkshire dale and Cotswold valley. It strikes a pleasant note when Richard Russell, citizen and merchant of York, leaves in his will, "for distribution among the farmers of Yorkes Walde, from whom I bought wool 20 l., and in the same way among the farmers of Lyndeshay 10 l." (1435) p.132-3
The will of a Thomas Paycocke also shows a generosity of spirit:
he did not forget Nicholas Goodday of Stisted and Robert Goodday of Coggeshall and their families, nor their relative John, who was a priest and had ten shillings for a trental. All these Gooddays were doubtless bound to Thomas Paycocke by ties of work as well as of friendship. They belonged to a well-known Coggeshall family, for generations connected with the cloth industry. Thomas Paycocke's namesake and grand-nephew, whose will is dated 1580, was still in close relations with them, and left "to Edwarde Goodaye my godson Fourite shillinges and to every brother and sister the saide Edwarde hath livinge at the tyme of my decease tenne shillinges." The hurrying, scattering generation of to-day can hardly imagine the immovable stability of the village of past centuries, when generation after generation grew from cradle to grave in the same houses, on the same cobbled streets, and folk of the same name were still friends, as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them. p.155
Power then speculates in what manner Paycocke's industry was set out. It surprised me that industrial unrest had significant precusors in the late-medieval economy:
One detail Peacocke's will does not give us, which we should be glad to know: did he employ only domestic weavers, working in their own houses, or did he also keep a certain number of looms working in his house? It was characteristic of the period in which he lived that something like a miniature factory system was establishing itself in the midst of the new outwork system. The clothiers were beginning to set up looms in their own houses and to work them by journeymen weavers; as a rule the independent weavers greatly disliked the practice, for either they were forced from the position of free masters into that of hired servants, obliged to go and work in the clothier's loom shop, or else they found their payment forced down by the ucompetition of the journeymen. Moreover, the clothiers sometimes owned and let out looms to their work-people, and then also part of the industrial independence of the weaver was lost. All through the first half of the sixteenth century the weavers in cloth districts kept on petitioning Parliament against this new evil of capitalism. It was as though, long before it established itself in England, they had a prevision of the factory system and of the worker no longer owning either his raw material, his tool, his workshop or the produce of his industry, but only his labour; the master-weaver dwindled into a hired hand. P.157
Short though it is, this is a extremely rich book, and for me shone some spotlights onto an overwhelmingly large area of darkness. It's human approach helps the imagination along in building bridges from our modern mindset to the ones of our ancestors. The book presumes a knowledge of French and middle English, but does not quote these sources often.
May 29, 2020
Uzun zamandır okuma listemde olan bir kitaptı. Ortaçağ dünyasından tüccar, seyyah, ev hanımı, rahibe gibi farklı "tip"ler üzerine inşa edilmiş bir kitap fikri gerçekten heyecan verici. Her ne kadar kitap artık tarihsel bir değere sahip olsa da... Zira kitabın ilk yayın tarihi 1939. Dolayısıyla biraz "eski" bir kitaptan bahsediyoruz. Bir de ideal tip inşa etmenin bedeli olarak gelen kaçınılmaz bir nüans kaybı sorunu var. Ama dediğim gibi bu ideal tipler yaratmanın kaçınılmaz bir sonucu. Benim için asıl sorun biyografiler inşa eden bir kitaptan beklediğim okuma (dinleme) zevkini ve "canlılığı" alamamış olmam. Öyle ki sıkılmadan dinlediğim (storytel) kısımlar azınlıktaydı. Ortaçağ dünyasına dair ayrıntıları yakalamak açısından güzeldi, ama daha hikayeli bir kitap bekliyordum. 3.5'tan 4 diyelim.
March 25, 2021
An interesting book and it's easy to see why this was such an influential early book for social historiography. For a modern reader more accustomed to modern "popular" history it can be a tough read as a lot of quotes/passages are in old English or other languages with no translations provided. It is interesting to see quotes sticking to their primary sources but it does take the reader out of the narrative when you have to pause to try and decipher the writing. Of course, this is not a narrative book per se so for some this might not be a problem
April 8, 2020
Piacevole ed educativo. Adatto anche a chi conosce poco il Medioevo (e già dire Medioevo è molto generico...), perché ogni capitolo ha una parte introduttiva che permette di inquadrare la persona nel suo contesto.
Non è storia con date e battaglie, ma storia della quotidianità.
Consigliatissimo.
Non è storia con date e battaglie, ma storia della quotidianità.
Consigliatissimo.
July 30, 2020
Buono per prendere spunto per un libro che vorrei scrivere, me l'avevano dato alle medie, inadatto e impossibile per un ragazzino. Prof, letto solo ora!
October 23, 2020
A close look, though primary sources, at several lives representing a cross section of Medieval society. Detailed and scholarly, but also empathetic and occasionally lighthearted.
September 23, 2024
Harika bir eser, berbat bir çeviri...Devam edemedim.
November 7, 2021
1) "I believe that social history lends itself particularly to what may be called a personal treatment, and that the past may be made to live again for the general reader more effectively by personifying it than by presenting it in the form of learned treatises on the development of the manor or on medieval trade, essential as these are to the specialist. For history, after all, is valuable only in so far as it lives, and Maeterlinck's cry, 'There are no dead,' should always be the historian's motto. It is the idea that history is about dead people, or, worse still, about movements and conditions which seem but vaguely related to the labours and passions of flesh and blood, which has driven history from bookshelves where the historical novel still finds a welcome place."
2) "'Let us now praise famous men,' was the historian's motto. He forgot to add 'and our fathers that begat us'. He did not care to probe the obscure lives and activities of the great mass of humanity, upon whose slow toil was built up the prosperity of the world and who were the hidden foundation of the political and constitutional edifice reared by the famous men he praised. To speak of ordinary people would have been beneath the dignity of history. Carlyle struck a significant note of revolt: 'The thing I want to see,' he said, 'is not Redbook lists and Court Calendars and Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed. ... Mournful, in truth, it is to behold what the business called “History” in these so enlightened and illuminated times still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men lived and had their being; were it but economically, as, what wages they got and what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot. ... History, as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board.'"
3) "The rest of Marco Polo's life is quickly told. The legend goes that all the youth of Venice used to resort to the Ca' Polo in order to hear his stories, for not even among the foreign sailors on the quays, where once the boy Marco had wandered and asked about the Tartars, were stories the like of his to be heard. And because he was always talking of the greatness of Kublai Khan's dominions, the millions of revenue, the millions of junks, the millions of riders, the millions of towns and cities, they gave him a nickname and jestingly called him Marco Milione, or Il Milione, which is, being interpreted, 'Million Marco'; and the name even crept into the public documents of the Republic, while the courtyard of his house became known as the Corte Milione."
4) "In the summer Eglentyne was sometimes allowed to work in the convent garden, or even to go out haymaking with the other nuns; and came back round-eyed to confide in her confessor that she had seen the cellaress returning therefrom seated behind the chaplain on his nag, and had thought what fun it must be to jog behind stout Dan John."
5) "So prevalent was the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a special Devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big bag. In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who generally had a sharp eye for devils. One Latin rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack: 'These are they who wickedly corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner and the over-leaper: Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's words.' Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the story as it is told in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, written for the delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century: 'We read of a holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made; and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke. And when he came before the Abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonied and afeard of the foulness and misshape of him and said unto him: What art thou? And he answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is Tittivillus and I do mine office that is committed unto me. And what is thine office? said the Abbot. He answered: I must each day, he said, bring my master a thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I must be sore beaten.'"
6) [Thomas Betson in a letter to Katherine Riche, his betrothed] "And if ye would be a good eater of your meat alway, that ye might wax and grow fast to be a woman ye should make me the gladdest man of the world, by my troth; for when I remember your favour and your sad loving dealing to me wards, for sooth ye make me even very glad and joyous in my heart; and on the tother side again, when I remember your young youth, and see well that ye be none eater of your meat, the which should help you greatly in waxing, for sooth then ye make me very heavy again."
7) "Meanwhile what of little Katherine Riche? She recurs over and over in Thomas Betson's letters. Occasionally she is in disgrace, for she was not handy with her pen. 'I am wroth with Katherine,' writes he to her mother, 'because she sendeth me no writing. I have to her divers times and for lack of answer I wax weary; she might get a secretary if she would and if she will not, it shall put me to less labour to answer her letters again.'"
8) [An agent of Sir William Stonor, partner & creditor of Thomas Betson, upon having visited the latter in ill-health] "I trust to Jesu he shall endure till the messenger come again; longer the physicians have not determined."
9) "Only imagine the difficulties of poor Thomas Betson, when into his counting-house there wandered in turn the Andrew guilder of Scotland, the Arnoldus gulden of Gueldres (very much debased), the Carolus groat of Charles of Burgundy, new crowns and old crowns of France, the David and the Falewe of the Bishopric of Utrecht, the Hettinus groat of the Counts of Westphalia, the Lewe or French Louis d'or, the Limburg groat, the Milan groat, the Nimueguen groat, the Phelippus or Philippe d'or of Brabant, the Plaques of Utrecht, the Postlates of various bishops, the English Ryall (worth ten shillings), the Scots Rider or the Rider of Burgundy (so called because they bore the figure of a man on horseback), the Florin Rhenau of the Bishopric of Cologne and the Setillers. He had to know the value in English money of them all, as it was fixed for the time being by the Fellowship [of the Staple], and most of them were debased past all reason."
10) "It is Thomas Paycocke, clothier, round whom the whole manufacture revolves. He gives the wool to the women to comb it and card it and spin it; he receives it from them again and gives it to the weaver to be woven into cloth; he gives the cloth to the fuller to be fulled and the dyer to be dyed; and having received it when finished, he has it made up into dozens and sends it off to the wholesale dealer, the draper, who sells it; perhaps he has been wont to send it to that very 'Thomas Perpoint, draper' whom he calls 'my cosyn' and makes his executor."
2) "'Let us now praise famous men,' was the historian's motto. He forgot to add 'and our fathers that begat us'. He did not care to probe the obscure lives and activities of the great mass of humanity, upon whose slow toil was built up the prosperity of the world and who were the hidden foundation of the political and constitutional edifice reared by the famous men he praised. To speak of ordinary people would have been beneath the dignity of history. Carlyle struck a significant note of revolt: 'The thing I want to see,' he said, 'is not Redbook lists and Court Calendars and Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed. ... Mournful, in truth, it is to behold what the business called “History” in these so enlightened and illuminated times still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men lived and had their being; were it but economically, as, what wages they got and what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot. ... History, as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board.'"
3) "The rest of Marco Polo's life is quickly told. The legend goes that all the youth of Venice used to resort to the Ca' Polo in order to hear his stories, for not even among the foreign sailors on the quays, where once the boy Marco had wandered and asked about the Tartars, were stories the like of his to be heard. And because he was always talking of the greatness of Kublai Khan's dominions, the millions of revenue, the millions of junks, the millions of riders, the millions of towns and cities, they gave him a nickname and jestingly called him Marco Milione, or Il Milione, which is, being interpreted, 'Million Marco'; and the name even crept into the public documents of the Republic, while the courtyard of his house became known as the Corte Milione."
4) "In the summer Eglentyne was sometimes allowed to work in the convent garden, or even to go out haymaking with the other nuns; and came back round-eyed to confide in her confessor that she had seen the cellaress returning therefrom seated behind the chaplain on his nag, and had thought what fun it must be to jog behind stout Dan John."
5) "So prevalent was the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a special Devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big bag. In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who generally had a sharp eye for devils. One Latin rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack: 'These are they who wickedly corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner and the over-leaper: Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's words.' Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the story as it is told in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, written for the delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century: 'We read of a holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made; and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke. And when he came before the Abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonied and afeard of the foulness and misshape of him and said unto him: What art thou? And he answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is Tittivillus and I do mine office that is committed unto me. And what is thine office? said the Abbot. He answered: I must each day, he said, bring my master a thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I must be sore beaten.'"
6) [Thomas Betson in a letter to Katherine Riche, his betrothed] "And if ye would be a good eater of your meat alway, that ye might wax and grow fast to be a woman ye should make me the gladdest man of the world, by my troth; for when I remember your favour and your sad loving dealing to me wards, for sooth ye make me even very glad and joyous in my heart; and on the tother side again, when I remember your young youth, and see well that ye be none eater of your meat, the which should help you greatly in waxing, for sooth then ye make me very heavy again."
7) "Meanwhile what of little Katherine Riche? She recurs over and over in Thomas Betson's letters. Occasionally she is in disgrace, for she was not handy with her pen. 'I am wroth with Katherine,' writes he to her mother, 'because she sendeth me no writing. I have to her divers times and for lack of answer I wax weary; she might get a secretary if she would and if she will not, it shall put me to less labour to answer her letters again.'"
8) [An agent of Sir William Stonor, partner & creditor of Thomas Betson, upon having visited the latter in ill-health] "I trust to Jesu he shall endure till the messenger come again; longer the physicians have not determined."
9) "Only imagine the difficulties of poor Thomas Betson, when into his counting-house there wandered in turn the Andrew guilder of Scotland, the Arnoldus gulden of Gueldres (very much debased), the Carolus groat of Charles of Burgundy, new crowns and old crowns of France, the David and the Falewe of the Bishopric of Utrecht, the Hettinus groat of the Counts of Westphalia, the Lewe or French Louis d'or, the Limburg groat, the Milan groat, the Nimueguen groat, the Phelippus or Philippe d'or of Brabant, the Plaques of Utrecht, the Postlates of various bishops, the English Ryall (worth ten shillings), the Scots Rider or the Rider of Burgundy (so called because they bore the figure of a man on horseback), the Florin Rhenau of the Bishopric of Cologne and the Setillers. He had to know the value in English money of them all, as it was fixed for the time being by the Fellowship [of the Staple], and most of them were debased past all reason."
10) "It is Thomas Paycocke, clothier, round whom the whole manufacture revolves. He gives the wool to the women to comb it and card it and spin it; he receives it from them again and gives it to the weaver to be woven into cloth; he gives the cloth to the fuller to be fulled and the dyer to be dyed; and having received it when finished, he has it made up into dozens and sends it off to the wholesale dealer, the draper, who sells it; perhaps he has been wont to send it to that very 'Thomas Perpoint, draper' whom he calls 'my cosyn' and makes his executor."
February 2, 2018
This book uses primary sources to dig into the lives of 6 Medieval people -- Bodo the peasant, Marco Polo, Eglentyne the Prioress, a Paris housewife, an English wool merchant, and an English clothier. Quite a wide variety with a focus on more common people instead of the typical royalty. The author is obviously a Chaucer fan, as many of the 6 map to Cantebury Tales characters, and does a good job highlighting the lives of each.
Written in 1924, its tone is also quite a pleasant contrast to many of today's "historical" writings. Before this one I had just finished a recently written book on Medieval woman, and in a bitter and condescending matter it attempted to spin Medieval times to support her political agenda. By contrast Eileen Power truly enjoys her foray into history, drawing out their joy of life, their hopes, and also their fears and struggles -- showing humans have always been human. Well recommended.
Written in 1924, its tone is also quite a pleasant contrast to many of today's "historical" writings. Before this one I had just finished a recently written book on Medieval woman, and in a bitter and condescending matter it attempted to spin Medieval times to support her political agenda. By contrast Eileen Power truly enjoys her foray into history, drawing out their joy of life, their hopes, and also their fears and struggles -- showing humans have always been human. Well recommended.
Read
September 9, 2022Ortaçağda yaşamış sıradan insanların hayat hikayelerine misafir olduğumuz bu kitapta, yeri geliyor bir çiftçinin pazar günü tatilinde nasıl eğlendiğini, yeri geliyor rahibelerin sıkı ve muhafazakar kuralları nasıl esnettiğini, yeri geliyor bir yün tüccarının satışta nasıl hile yaptığını görüyoruz. 6 farklı profil üzerinden yapılan çalışmada benim için çiftçi, rahibe ve ev kadını kısımları çekiciydi. Ortaçağdaki gündelik hayatı sıkılmadan öğrenmek için okunabilecek bir kitap.
Ahlak algısının o zamandan günümüze ne kadar değiştiğini (özellikle kadınlar konusunda) ve o zamanlarda da insanların eğlenmek için fırsat kolladığını görmek beni etkiledi.
Ortaçağ tarihine ilgi duyanlara öneririm.
Ahlak algısının o zamandan günümüze ne kadar değiştiğini (özellikle kadınlar konusunda) ve o zamanlarda da insanların eğlenmek için fırsat kolladığını görmek beni etkiledi.
Ortaçağ tarihine ilgi duyanlara öneririm.
January 25, 2020
Keşke dilinde okumak nasip olsaydı, neyse. Kitap beni biraz hayal kırıklığına uğrattı açıkçası. İlk sebebi hikaye formatında bekliyordum, araştırma metni gibi değil. Roma tarihi okurken hafif bir popüler tarih kitabıyla ara vereyim diye düşünmüştüm lakin çok büyük bir mesele değil. İkincisi marksist tarih anlayışının propagandasının açıkça yapılması ve yoğun bir şekilde yapılması. Ancak ne olursa olsun kuvvetli ve titiz bir araştırma olduğu gerçeğini değiştirmiyor. Konuya ilgi duyanlar için giriş niteliğinde bir kitap.
March 16, 2025
100 yıl önce ekonomi tarihi bakış açısıyla yazılmış, geçen zamana göre de pek eskimemiş. Fakat o zaman ilgi çekici olan ortaçağ kaynakları bugün heyecan vermiyor. Kitabın %90 ı da bu örnekler.
Giriş bölümünde Roma imparatorluğu yıkılması dönemi en ilginç gelen bölümdü: “onların devlet adamlıkları kötüleştikçe yolları iyileşti…”
Giriş bölümünde Roma imparatorluğu yıkılması dönemi en ilginç gelen bölümdü: “onların devlet adamlıkları kötüleştikçe yolları iyileşti…”
October 17, 2012
This book was hard to get into at first, but it turned out to be really interesting. I don't know of another book that has shed so much light on the day-to-day lives of Medieval people. It could be boring in parts, yet fascinating in others. It's a must for anyone studying that time period.
November 27, 2012
E' un libro imperdibile:la quotidianità del medioevo raccontata attraverso sei personaggi comuni,la cui vita è rimasta impigliata negli archivi,nelle lapidi funerarie,nei contratti,nelle lettere personali e commerciali,negli atti dei processi.
Lo consiglio vivamente a tutti.
Lo consiglio vivamente a tutti.
May 16, 2010
Some plodding prose and dated syntax, but worth the effort if you have an interest in the daily travails of mostly ordinary people in medieval times.
August 11, 2019
While interesting, this book’s age definitely can be seen through its content.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews