Paris in the Middle Ages

by Simone Roux, Jo Ann McNamara (Translator)

Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty, mountebanks, Knights Templar, merchants, prostitutes, and canons. Bursting outward from the encompassing wall, it was Europe's largest, most cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians over the course of a dozen generations as Paris grew from a military stronghold after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 to a city recovering from the Black Death of the 1390s.

Roux peers into the private lives of people within their homes and chronicles the public world of affairs and entertainments, filling the pages of her book with laborers, shopkeepers, magistrates, thieves, and prelates. She examines the varied populations living within their own realms but sharing the streets of the metropolis, in the Latin Quarter, where the university dominated; in the precincts of Notre Dame, with its large number of clerical inhabitants; the mercantile Right Bank; and in the area surrounding the royal palace of the Louvre, with its attendant palaces for the king's satellites. She breathes life into dusty documents by explicating the lingo of street insults, making sense of the cults of saints—Sebastian, who was riddled with arrows, became the patron saint of tapestry workers—and entering the courtrooms and confessionals to tell how people actually ate, slept, dressed, fought, worked, and worshipped in the later Middle Ages.

Genres: History, France, Medieval History, Medieval

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This shows the utility and the limitations of microhistory. Roux teases out pretty much everything that twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources can say about Paris in the Middle Ages, but more often than not, has to extrapolate from records of the notable to speak about the bourgeois. Which is a shame, because what she can say -- the gender stuff especially -- is fascinating and I want more.

[Thingolo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book about medieval Paris, which, however, is not without some shortcomings. The author uses the 'from the source' approach, which is very good in itself, but leads not only to constant repetition of the same things, but also to a somewhat unclear organization of the material. For example, some information about architecture turns out to be scattered over several chapters. Moreover, some things that are extremely interesting for lay readers, such as the structure of city government, are almost left out.
There are a number of vague sentences that one has to re-read for several times, which, perhaps, is only a defect of the Russian translation.
None the less, the book is highly recommended, as the author was able to squeeze out a lot from the limited number of sources that have come down to us.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very disappointing history of Paris. It is an extremely dry, academic history. There is not a single illustration or map, except for the front cover. There is a one page index. I wouldn't recommend it.

[Sanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful study into the ordinary life of Parisians in the late Middle Ages. Roux leaves behind the big events and tries to decipher what everyday life was like: how the city looked, how the Parisians lived and what their houses looked like. It goes into detail how the different lifes of various classes were structured; the careers of the guild members, the miserable life of the poor, and the influence that the powerful citizens had on the government of Paris and France in general.

If at all possible, read this book in the original language (French). The English translation is not that good, as there're lots of weird sentences and spelling errors - words which are almost the same in French not properly translated to the way it's written in English.