A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague

A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers, and general readers. By moving out from the peasant Cecilia Penifader's perspective, the book explores the ties and tensions that bound all medieval people-poor as well as rich-into a medieval society. It looks at manors as well as villages; parishes, faith, and ritual; royal taxes and justice; economy and trade; and famine and disease. The book also provides a primer on the fact-finding and interpretative debates that are at the heart of the historians craft. Each chapter includes a new section on how medievalists today are studying such topics as puberty, morals, courtship, and climate change. The illustrations, taken from the famous Luttrell Psalter, provide a coherent, rich, and interpretatively complex visual program. And the final chapter explores some of the different ways in which historians, for better and for worse, have understood medieval society.