Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[A] book that displays the full array of Baldwin's mastery over the historian's sources and method attained over the course of his life . . . The exploration of the aristocrats' social, economic, and mental worlds using this wide range of sources is a masterful feat . . . With
Knights, Lords, and Ladies Baldwin has left us with an excellent example, useful to graduate students and seasoned scholars alike, on how to define the limits of an inquiry, assemble sources relevant to that inquiry, and interpret them deeply but with restraint." *
Canadian Journal of History *
"It is a tribute to [Baldwin's] scholarship that even without his own final revisions, the book brims with information that will be valuable to specialists and to students of French history. The questions he has raised will stand as an invitation to a new generation of scholars in search of medieval aristocrats and their world." * Speculum *
"This last book by a master historian not only sums up a life's work, but probes it afresh. Drawing on visual evidence and current archaeology as well as the literary culture he knew so well, John W. Baldwin recreates the elite society of Parisian France in the time of Philip Augustus with precision and depth." * Thomas N. Bisson, Harvard University *
"John Baldwin's final masterwork is the crowning achievement of a life dedicated to the history of the Middle Ages. Even more, by bringing together for the first time every kind of documentation imaginable, he here offered at the micro level a model without parallel for the writing of 'total history.'" * Jean-Claude Schmitt, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword, William Chester Jordan
List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Chapter 1. In Search of Aristocrats
Chapter 2. Who's Who
Chapter 3. Family
Chapter 4. Aristocratic Castles and Residences
Chapter 5. Fiefs and Homage: The Nomina militum and Scripta de feodis
Chapter 6. The Landed Wealth of Lay Aristocrats
Chapter 7. The Landed Wealth of Churches and Monasteries
Chapter 8. The Kingdom of Heaven
Chapter 9. The Voice of Vernacular French
Chapter 10. Knights at the Cathedral of Chartres
Appendix 1. Tables
Appendix 2. Genealogies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
