Speaking of good books

[chocolatepot]

I re-picked up Those Terrible Middle Ages a couple days ago and am still going through it bit by bit from where I'd left my bookmark, and I still really recommend it. The research is heavily based on French sources (as it's by a French woman and was originally written in French), but it so amply makes the points that a) the Middle Ages were not a homogenous block of time, and b) many of the awful, oppressive, ignorant things we associate with that period actually derive from the very end of the period or the Renaissance. The chapter on women was obvs my favorite, I'm going to have to look out for Pernoud's Women in the Days of the Cathedrals.

Comments

[lliira]

This looks like a great book. What she's saying is what I was taught once I reached college-level history courses, but I've never seen it synthesized in one book.

[chocolatepot]

It is! (It even has almost all 5 star reviews on Amazon.) It's written/translated in a very academic style and there are times when I have to consciously focus to get a sentence, but it's also pretty clear: here is a misconception, here are multiple examples disproving it. I think the most difficult thing for me is that I don't know a lot of the French historical figures, and I definitely don't know the order of the kings, so I have to pay a lot more attention to the specific dates given.