After the Black Death, Second Edition: A Social History of Early Modern Europe

by George Huppert

Book Overview

Praise for the first edition:

"To give a sense of immediacy and vividness to the long period in such a short space is a major achievement." --History

"Huppert's book is a little masterpiece every teacher should welcome." --Renaissance Quarterly

A work of genuine social history, After the Black Death leads the reader into the real villages and cities of European society. For this second edition, George Huppert has added a new...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253211808
• ISBN13: 9780253211804
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Entertaining but one sided

This book is a very enjoyable and colorful description of life from the 1400's to the 1600's. However, if your only knowledge of European history was this book, you would think that history ended in the 1600s with masses of starving naked people lining the roads of burnt villages, while distant cities were filled with no one but idle nobility with their servants and some street venders. Seems a bit too much class warfare too me. During the period of the 1300's to the 1600's there were tremdendous developments in the sciences, technologies, and humanities. This book discusses little of those. Still, it is an excellent description of the effects of changes in warfare on common people. It description on the motivations and benefits of all the societal changes I found to be better described by other books.

European society before the modern age

Huppert provides the best quick introduction to how European society _really worked_ before the industrial age. He starts with the village and the family, then moves to cities, elites, and the way things (slowly, slooooowly) changed.The book does a great job of combining big slow processes with enough local detail that the reader stays interested. Based mostly on France, but his view applies to all of Continental Europe from 1348 to about 1800.