The age of chivalry;: Manners and morals, 1000-1450

The Middle Ages have often been thought of as little more than a thousand years of barbarism and superstition separating the grandeur of Rome from the glories of the Renaissance. In 'The Age of Chivalry, however, Charles T. Wood shows that the medieval period was also a time of exuberant vitality, an era whose manners and morals did much to shape the outlook of the modern world. After a prologue setting forth the formation of medieval Europe, Professor Wood depicts the human situation at around the year 1000, a time when men were the prisoners rather than the masters of their environment. Europe at that time, he writes, was no place for the weak and tender-hearted; "torment and tragedy were the constant companions of rich and poor alike". But with the revolution in agriculture, the development of a money economy, and the consequent rise of the towns, there arose among all classes a buoyant enthusiasm; and with the appearance of chivalry and romantic love, "Europe had arrived at a new level of civilization, one possessing a cultural coherence unknown since the fall of Rome". In the thirteenth century, the political face of Europe began to take on features that would last well into the modern world, and a constitutional framework was created for the more peaceful settlement of political and social disputes and of the conflict between religious and secular values. During the later Middle Ages, however, the catastrophically savage and brutal period of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War, "the buoyant optimism that had characterized the long period of expansion gave way to feelings of dread and impending doom from which wild revels and senseless display seemed to provide the only release". Economic depression gripped the age, and "religion itself seemed to crumble, thus adding to the woes that political and economic distress had already engendered." With the emergence of new attitudes in the fifteenth century--attitudes that brought the age of chivalry...