Cornell University Press
The Development of Western Civilization
This concise narrative offers a comprehensive introduction to the important developments—economic, social, religious, intellectual, and artistic—that took place in both western and eastern Europe during a crucial century. Besides describing the revival in the arts and the achievements of the new monarchs and the Italian despots, the book treats the remarkable economic recovery from the great depression of the late Middle Ages and the incorporation of eastern Europe into the western orbit.
The fourteenth century has usually been dismissed as a period of irrelevant misfortune and confusion. In this latest addition to the popular Development of Western Civilization series, however, Professor Lerner demonstrates that the age, in its response to natural disasters and to the collapse of the overextended ambitions of the previous century, initiated some of the most fundamental of modern beliefs and social structures. The author's fluent summary of this period of catastrophe and triumph provides a concise and readable story of the decline of the medieval world and premonitions of the Renaissance.
