The Later Medieval City 1300-1500

✍ Scribed by David Nicholas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 448
• Series: A History of Urban Society in Europe
• Edition: Reprint
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

First published 1997 by Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

"The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500", the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, "The Growth of the Medieval City". (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity.

The later medieval cities developed permanent bureaucracies providing a huge range of public services, and they were paid for by sophisticated systems of taxation and public borrowing. The survival of their fuller, richer records allow us not only to apply a more statistical approach, but also to get much closer, to the splendours and squalors of everyday city-life than was possible in the earlier volume. The book concludes with a set of vibrant chapters on women and children and religious minorities in the city, on education and culture, and on the tenor of ordinary urban existence.

Like its predecessor, this book is massively, and vividly, documented. Its approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, and its examples and case studies are drawn from across Europe: from France, England, Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and Italy, with briefer reviews of the urban experience elsewhere from Baltic to Balkans. The result is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date study of its multifaceted subject. It is a formidable achievement.

✦ Table of Contents

List of Maps and Plans x
Editor’s Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii
1. The Medieval City at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century 1
2. Cities in Crisis: the Economic and Demographic Realignments of Urban Europe in the Later Middle Ages 25
3. The City and the Region: City-states and the Symbiosis of the Rural and Urban Economies 72
4. City Governments and Urban Conflict: Patricians and Political Guilds 108
5. Public Administration and Finance in the Later Medieval Cities 156
6. The Elites of the Later Medieval Cities 180
7. Occupational Guilds, the Middle and Lower Orders, and Poverty in the Later Medieval City 203
8. The Legal Marginals of Urban Society: Women, Children and Religious Minorities in the Later Medieval Cities 258
9. Education, Culture and Community in the Later Medieval City 288
10. The Tenor of Daily Life in the Later Medieval City 322
Glossary 345
Suggestions for Further Reading 348
Abbreviations 356
Bibliography 360
Maps 397
Index 423