num_pages: 304
description: This book examines the most important themes in European social and economic history from the beginning of growth around the year 1000 to the first wave of global exchange in the 1490s. These five hundred years witnessed the rise of economic systems such as capitalism and the social theories that would have a profound influence on the rest of the world over the next five centuries. The basic story the human search for food clothing and shelter in a world of violence and scarcity is a familiar one and the work and daily routines of ordinary women and men are the focus of this volume. Surveying the full extent of Europe from east to west and north to south Steven Epstein illuminates family life economic and social thought war technologies and other major themes while giving equal attention to developments in trade crafts and agriculture. The great waves of famine and then plague in the fourteenth century provide the centerpiece of a book that seeks to explain the causes of Europes uneven prosperity and its response to catastrophic levels of death. Epstein also sets social and economic developments within the context of the Christian culture and values that were common across Europe and that were in constant tension with Muslims Jews and dissidents within its boundaries and the great Islamic and Tartar states on its frontier.
language: English
title: An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500
publisher: Cambridge University Press