Lectures for A Medieval Survey

A Personal View of the Middle Ages, by Lynn H. Nelson

The following are a series of lecture outlines and essays used in a freshman-level survey course on the History of Medieval Europe. I try to add to these notes and to update them on a regular basis, but the quality of presentation varies widely.

• From Roman Empire to Medieval World
  • The Roman Empire at its Height
  • The Later Roman Empire
  • The Rise of Christianity
  • The Life of Apollinaris Sidonius
  • Notes on Reading Beowulf
  • The Advent of the Germans
  • The Age of Justinian
  • The Rise of the Franks
  • Notes on Alcuin and his Renaissance
  • Early Medieval Law
  • The Development of the Western Church
  • The Origins and Expansion of Monasticism
  • The Rise and Expansion of Islam
  • The Carolingian Empire
  • The Fall of the Carolingian Empire
    

• An Era of Decentralization
  • Three Views of Feudalism
  • The Life of Gerald the Good

• The Feudalization and Reform of the Church
  • Cluny and Church Reform
  • The Life of Gerbert of Aurillac
  • The Investiture Conflict

• "Feudal" Society
  • Notes on Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, The Cid
  • The Peasants: Advances in Agricultural Technology
  • The Revival of Commerce and Towns
  • European Economic Revival
  • The First Crusade

• The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
  • The Shoemaker Jofre Isaac
  • The State of the Nobility
  • The Homeless Indigents
  • Medieval Philosophy
  • The Birth of the Universities
  • The Mendicant Friars
• The Thirteenth-Century Crystallization
  • The Little Flowers
  • Innocent III and Challenges to the Church
  • The Rise of Popular Heresies
  • Frederick II, Stupor Mundi
  • Europe in 1300

• The Ordeals of the Fourteenth Century
  • The Avignon Papacy
  • The Rise of Capitalism and Decline of the Gilds
  • The Great Famine and the Black Death
  • The Hundred Years' War
  • The Sundering of Society
  • The Great Schism and Conciliar Movement
  • Some Background on the Life of Margery Kempe of Lynn

• The End of an Era and the Dawn of a New Age
  • The National Monarchies
  • Europe on the Eve of Discovery
  • The Discovery of the New World and End of the Old
  • Some Achievements of Medieval Europe