دانلود کتاب Patterns of Medieval Society

The selections which appear in this volume of readings in the social history of medieval western Europe have been chosen with a two-fold purpose: to acquaint the general reader with the sort of evidence normally examined by professional historians and to explore questions which may not be too remote from the modern reader's current concerns. Although these two purposes may, superficially at least, strike some readers as being incompatible, I think that each can serve the other well if the individual student remains conscious both of the real distinction between them and of the pleasure he can get from exploring those areas in which they may be congruent.

In order to facilitate the twentieth-century student's approach to the authentically medieval problems examined in the following pages, I have adopted some analytical categories which have been made familiar by modern sociology. The use of terms such as "class," "outgroup," and the like need do no essential violence to standards of historical purity if it is remembered that these terms function simply as pedagogical aids rather than as final judgments. It should also be pointed out that medieval men who thought and wrote about such matters made constant use themselves of terms like "order," "estate," and "rank" which will strike the ordinarily sensitive modern reader as being very similar to the "classes" of which we tend to speak, at any rate in our less technical or doctrinaire moments.

A special effort has been made throughout to include several kinds of source materials. Chronicles and biographies of the conventional sort constitute the nucleus of the collection, as is fitting for any work with a basically historical orientation. But legal documents, both in the raw authenticity of charters, contracts, court records, and the like (with extensive footnoting to banish some of their technical mystery) and in the more seductive and questionable form of the legal treatise (e.g., the complementary selections of III, 3, and IV, 6) are represented in no small number.