num_pages: 272
description: Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty mountebanks Knights Templar merchants prostitutes and canons. Bursting outward from the encompassing wall it was Europe's largest most cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians over the course of a dozen generations as Paris grew from a military stronghold after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 to a city recovering from the Black Death of the 1390s.Roux peers into the private lives of people within their homes and chronicles the public world of affairs and entertainments filling the pages of her book with laborers shopkeepers magistrates thieves and prelates. She examines the varied populations living within their own realms but sharing the streets of the metropolis in the Latin Quarter where the university dominated; in the precincts of Notre Dame with its large number of clerical inhabitants; the mercantile Right Bank; and in the area surrounding the royal palace of the Louvre with its attendant palaces for the king's satellites. She breathes life into dusty documents by explicating the lingo of street insults making sense of the cults of saints--Sebastian who was riddled with arrows became the patron saint of tapestry workers--and entering the courtrooms and confessionals to tell how people actually ate slept dressed fought worked and worshipped in the later Middle Ages.
language: English
title: Paris in the Middle Ages
publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press