Judith Bennett (1)

This is a brief, but pretty good, book which is ideally suited to work as a complementary text in an intro course to medieval European history. Bennett uses the life of Cecilia Penifader, a fourteenth century single peasant woman from central England, to investigate the social and economic structures of medieval life. While some of the attributions of 'must have felts' and 'probably thoughts' to Penifader make for uncomfortable reading for a historian, for an undergraduate it probably helps to make things more accessible. That said, Bennett is always careful to distinguish between fact and inference, and provides a useful model to a beginner historian as to how to approach the past.… (more)

This book seems to be intended for use as a textbook in an introductory college course on medieval European history. I think it fits the bill very well. It's quite short, but it packs a lot of information in its less than 150 pages. The information is general enough to be broadly useful (with suggestions for further reading on specific topics), and there's some explanation as to the historiography involved. The author chose the old method of looking at a single, real person from that era whose life happened to be well-documented, and then reconstructing the world around them.

Having already read many books on medieval history, I didn't learn very much from this one. But I think this would be a great book for college freshmen to start out with in their history classes. A good video companion would be Terry Jones's excellent Medieval Lives series.… (more)