Brief illustrated surveys of 600 years of post-Classical history are presented in Gerald Simons, Barbarian Europe (1968); and Philip Dixon, Barbarian Europe (1976). Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973), offers a scholarly examination of the development of early Europe. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Middle Ages
Useful reference works are The New Cambridge Medieval History, 7 vol. (1995–2005); Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vol. (1982–89); and Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2 vol. (2000). A good outline of events in the Middle Ages is R.L. Storey, Chronology of the Medieval World, 800–1491 (1973). Biographies of some important historians can be found in Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil (eds.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies in the Formation of a Discipline, 3 vol. (1995–99). Two important volumes that represent scholarly perspectives of the late 20th and early 21st century are Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, The Medieval World (2001); and Lester K. Little and Barbara Rosenwein (eds.), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (1998).
Terminology and periodization are discussed in Fred C. Robinson, “Medieval, the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 59(4):745–756 (October 1984); William A. Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” Journal of World History, 3(1):13–53 (Spring 1992); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (1970); Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1968); Jacques Le Goff, “The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet,” in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (1980), pp. 3–28; Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Âge, une imposture (1992); Timothy Reuter, “Medievaclass="underline" Another Tyrannous Construct?,” The Medieval History Journal, 1(1):25–45 (1998), and other articles in the same number. Stuart Airlie, “Strange Eventful Histories: The Middle Ages in the Cinema,” chapter 10 in Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, The Medieval World (2001), pp. 163–183, provides an introduction to depictions of the Middle Ages in film.
A discussion of late antiquity is G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999). Discussions of the “long Middle Ages” include Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800 (1981); Jacques Le Goff, “For an Extended Middle Ages,” in his The Medieval Imagination (1988; originally published in French), pp. 18–23; Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History, 4(1):85–125 (November 2000); Elizabeth R. Brown, “On 1500,” chapter 29 in Linehan and Nelson’s The Medieval World (above), pp. 691–710.
Surveys (cited here in reverse chronological sequence) include Eamon Duffy, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd ed. (2006); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000, 2nd ed. (2003); Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Early Middle Ages: Europe, 400–1000 (2001); R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (2000); David Nicholas, The Transformation of Europe 1300–1600 (1999); Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (1998, reprinted 2002); R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (1995); Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vol. (1994–95); Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993); Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church (1992); Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (1988); J.H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450 (1988; reissued 1997); Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (1982); Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (1979, reissued 1987); and R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953, reissued 1998).
The classic work describing the older idea of decay is that of Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996). A useful counterpoint is Kaminsky’s “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis” (above). Edward Peters
The Renaissance
Historiographical problems
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1890; originally published in German, 1860), is a classic work, elegant and stimulating, available in many later editions, but its thesis, that 14th-century Italians broke sharply with their medieval past to create modern states and a highly individualistic secular society and culture, has been heavily modified by most modern specialists. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (1948, reprinted 1981), offers an excellent introduction, but recent scholarship has expanded the range and depth of knowledge and dissolved such interpretive consensus as still existed when Ferguson wrote. E.F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies (1960); Tinsley Helton (ed.), The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of the Theories and Interpretations of the Age (1961, reprinted 1980); and Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background, 2nd ed. (1977), characterize the interpretations of the 1960s. At present most Renaissance historians do not make the sweeping characterizations of the “spirit of an age” that once came so easily. An excellent historiographical and bibliographical guide to works about Europe outside Italy is Steven Ozment (ed.), Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (1982), not really limited to the Reformation.
The Italian Renaissance
Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (1979, reissued 1988), provides an informative survey. Florentine history is authoritatively surveyed in Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence (1969, reissued 1983). Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (1973), ventures beyond the fall of the Florentine republic. Venetian history is ably treated in D.S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580 (1970); William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797 (1974, reprinted 1986); and Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (1980). Social and cultural conditions and religious life are approached in Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (1971); Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (1980); David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (1985; originally published in French, 1978); Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (1982); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (1981); and Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality Versus Myth (1986). Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in her Women, History & Theory (1984), challenged Burckhardt’s thesis that women achieved equality with men in Renaissance Italy. Other good studies on women in the Renaissance include Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (1980); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. from French (1985); and Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986). Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr., The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (1980), is a controversial groundbreaking study.