Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

The history of Mediaeval Europe is so vast a subject that the attempt to deal with it in a small compass must entail either severe compression or what may appear at first sight reckless omission.

The path of compression has been trodden many times, as in J. H. Robinson’s Introduction to the History of Western Europe, or in such series as the ‘Periods of European History’ published by Messrs. Rivingtons for students, or text-books of European History published by the Clarendon Press and Messrs. Methuen.

To the authors of all these I should like to express my indebtedness both for facts and perspective, as to Mr. H. W. Davis for his admirable summary of the mediaeval outlook in the Home University Library series; but in spite of so many authorities covering the same ground, I venture to claim for the present book a pioneer path of ‘omission’; it may be reckless but yet, I believe, justifiable.

It has been my object not so much to supply students with facts as to make Mediaeval Europe live, for the many who, knowing nothing of her history, would like to know a little, in the lives of her principal heroes and villains, as well as in the tendencies of her classes, and in the beliefs and prejudices of her thinkers. This task I have found even more difficult than I had expected, for limits of space have insisted on the omission of many events and names I would have wished to include. These I have sacrificed to the hope of creating reality and arousing interest, and if I have in any way succeeded I should like to pay my thanks first of all to Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor for his two volumes of The Mediaeval Mind that have been my chief inspiration, and then to the many authors whose names and books I give elsewhere, and whose researches have enabled me to tell my tale.

IERNE L. PLUNKET

Genres: Audiobook, History

446 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Born in 1885, Ierne Arthur Lifford Plunket was the ninth child of the Hon. Arthur Plunket - son of the third Baron Plunket - and his wife, Louisa Frances Hewitt. She was educated at Queen Anne's, Caversham, from 1895-1899, and at Oxford High School from 1899-1902. She read History at Oxford, at the Society of Oxford Home Students (subsequently St. Anne's College), and when women were allowed to receive degrees, earned an MA. She was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an organizing secretary of the London Society for Women's Suffrage.

During WWI, Plunket served with the Scottish Women's Hospitals in Russia, and with the WRNS (Women's Royal Naval Service). After the war she was a Lecturer in History at University College, Southampton, but was forced to abandon her academic career in order to care for her ailing mother. It was around this time that she began to write children's fiction. From 1925, she is recorded as living at: Knockderry, Milford-on-Sea, Hampshire; Lyme Regis, Dorset; Bantry Bay, Ireland; and St. Leonard's-on-Sea, East Sussex. She died in 1970.

Reviews

[Tech Nossomy]

Republished as a paperback in 2017, this is a history book that has the hallmarks of a standard text, albeit archaic in its coverage of the subject matter. It delves mostly into the wars and political strife of the 1000 or so years that are commonly referred to as the Middle Ages and surprisingly little into everyday life or even how a millennium of historical records shed a view onto our own world.

[Galicius]

The most interesting chapters are those that deal with how life was lived by the people. There is much too little of that. Chapters 15 “Learning and Ecclesiastical Organization in the Middle Ages” and 16 “The Faith of the Middle Ages” stand out. The bulk of this fast historical crisscrossing from the decline of Rome to the Renaissance is names and dates of battles, defeats, carnages, wars that benumb the reader and make this selective summary of this great deal of time wash over and is quickly forgotten.