The Portable Medieval Reader

This is hands down the best Medieval reader of its kind. It covers a vast array of middle age topics: politics and warfare, the church, chivalry (of course), social and intellectual life, and more. The translations are superb, brought up-to-date so that modern readers will truly enjoy these timeless writings. At the same time, I commend the editors for choosing translations which capture the spirit of the originals. Anyone studying world history or literature will find this to be the perfect companion to their studies. I also highly recommend the following: 1. The Portable Roman Reader (Viking Portable Library) 2. The Portable Renaissance Reader 3. Medieval Europe: A Short History 4. The Portable Chaucer: Revised Edition (Viking Portable Library)

"Your two bright eyes will slay me suddenly, the beauty of them I cannot sustain, so keenly strikes it through my heart and brain." Just that poem by Chaucer is worth the read, but there is much more here in this wonderful collection. I especially enjoyed it because I felt like I got into the minds and lives of these people who lived so long ago. What better way to get to know any society than reading their writings! Well worth the time!!

The Portable Medieval Reader offers a great deal of extracts from hard to find works, but unfortunately it suffers from a lack of thematic cohesion and an ability to place actions and situations within an historical context. It is difficult to place the ideal reader, for a scholar would seek out the full texts, and a history buff would be best suited to reading overviews and coherent works rather than these extracts. What value, then, does the Portable Medieval Reader have? Well, it is a very interesting piece of work. During the Medieval period, which for this book is somewhere between the 11th and 15th centuries, the Catholic church hung heavy over the minds and hearts of the Western World. Her rulings, teaching and exhortations are like thick velvet drapes laid everywhere somewhat pretty, perhaps even comforting to look at and touch, but overall it serves to dull the essential nature of what it covers. There is a strong focus on churchly matters and the trappings of faith which makes sense when you realise that the majority of educated people were part of the clergy. Forgetting the church a moment, there are snippets of information from all areas of Medieval life. There are essays on how a good knight should behave, and on how a good wife should behave. There are recipes and writings on fashion, and there are biographies and histories. But these asides are brief, and even the longest and best biographies, which deal with Kings and other men of consequence, are either written by, or focused upon, the church and her power. Poetry is supported strongly within the book, although most of it lies towards the end. Chaucer has a (brief) section, but it is Abelard and various scattered 'anonymous' which take up the largest page counts. The reasoning of editors James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin was that Chaucer (and Boccaccio) are very easy to find, whereas John of Salisbury, Aniar MacConglinee, Bernart de Ventadorn and Guido Guinicelli are not. To me this is an admirable reason for inclusion (and exclusion), and for the most part, the choice pays off. Chaucer is, of course, a phenomenal poet, but the work suffers little from leaving him mostly out of the picture. The other poets, many anonymous, are shown variably as being witty, intelligent, lusty, bawdy, melancholy, despondent and happy. An even greater selection of poetry would have been appreciated, but what is here certainly provides a wide range of artistic expression. Another of the more interesting aspects of the work is the sections on the Jewish people, and on the Crusades. During the Medieval period, the rights of Jews were at a very low ebb, with usury and 'thieving Jews' being a massive problem for the church and the people. Jews were not allowed to own much land or have control over important assets and they were often persecuted and expelled from countries or killed. Reading Pope Gregory X's allows an unparalleled insight into the minds of the majority a

This book contains excerpts from 100+ different medieval texts on diverse subjects. The excerpts are arranged thematically, with like subjects grouped together. There is, for example, a section on monastic life and practice, with several different texts provided to illustrate monastic life both as it was supposed to be, as it actually was, and as it was seen by non-monks. The texts chosen provide accounts of various monastic orders (the Franciscans, the Cistercians, etc.)in different parts of Europe. Similar thematic sections are provided for nobles, peasants, craftsmen and merchants, and there are thematic sections on a range of more specific subjects to boot. The kinds of texts chosen range from the highly literary and erudite (poems, philosophical treatises, etc.) to the mundane and prosaic (court records, trade accounts, etc.) All in all it's an excellent compilation, although I wish more had been provided to "introduce" each selection-- with a bit more said about the author, the work the excerpt was taken from, it's specific historical context in which it was written, etc., so that the reader of "The Portable Medieval Reader" could be a bit more informed about the sources provided.