ABSTRACT
The first part of David Nicholas's massive two-volume study of the medieval city, this book is a major achievement in its own right. (It is also fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use it with its equally impressive sequel which is being published simultaneously.) In it, Professor Nicholas traces the slow regeneration of urban life in the early medieval period, showing where and how an urban tradition had survived from late antiquity, and when and why new urban communities began to form where there was no such continuity. He charts the different types and functions of the medieval city, its interdependence with the surrounding countryside, and its often fraught relations with secular authority. The book ends with the critical changes of the late thirteenth century that established an urban network that was strong enough to survive the plagues, famines and wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part One|84 pages
Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
chapter Chapter Two|30 pages
Suburbanisation and Deurbanisation in Merovingian and Carolingian Gaul, 500–830
chapter Chapter Three|31 pages
Challenge and Response: the Scandinavian and Muslim Attacks and the Revival of Urban Life in the West, 830–1000
part Two|84 pages
The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
part Three|104 pages
The Maturing of Medieval Urbanisation, c. 1190–c. 1270
chapter Chapter Eight|27 pages
The Commercial Cities of Thirteenth-century Italy under ‘Popular’ Oligarchies
part Four|49 pages
A Half-Century of Crisis