ABSTRACT
The social uses of the sacrament of baptism are treated in Joseph H. Lynch, Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1986).
There are several useful surveys of late medieval European history. Robert Lerner, The Age ofAdversity (Ithaca, NY, 1968) is an elementary sketch of the crises of the fourteenth century. Denys Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 2nd edn (London, 1989), is a more detailed and wide-ranging survey. Daniel Waley, Later Medieval Europe. From St Louis to Luther, 2nd edn (London, 1976), is also a broad survey; Wallace K. Ferguson, Europe in Transition, 1300-1520 (Boston, Mass., 1962) is still a readable treatment, though dated in some ways. Norman J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe, 450 BC-AD 1330 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 313-433, describes Europe in the decades before the arrival of the bubonic plague. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York, 1969), offers an absorbing account of the plague in fourteenth-century Europe. On the popular rebellions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries see Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, translated by A. Lytton-Sells (London, 1973).
