"In The Axe and the Oath, one of the world's leading medieval historians presents a compelling picture of daily life in the Middle Ages as it was experienced by ordinary people. Writing for general readers, Robert Fossier vividly describes how these vulnerable people confronted life, from birth to death, including childhood, marriage, work, sex, food, illness, religion, and the natural world. While most histories of the period focus on the ideas and actions of the few who wielded power and stress how different medieval people were from us, Fossier concentrates on the other nine-tenths of humanity in the period and concludes that "medieval man is us."
"Drawing on a broad range of evidence, Fossier describes how medieval men and women encountered, coped with, and understood the basic material facts of their lives. We learn how people related to agriculture, animals, the weather, the forest, and the sea; how they used alcohol and drugs; and how they buried their dead. But The Axe and the Oath is about much more than simply the material demands of life. We also learn how ordinary people experienced the social, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of medieval life, from memory and imagination to writing and the Church. The result is a sweeping new vision of the Middle Ages that will entertain and enlighten readers."

"We discuss the use of multivariate kernel smoothing methods to date manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 15th centuries, in the English county of Essex. The dataset consists of some 3300 dated and 5000 undated manuscripts, and the former are used as a training sample for imputing dates for the latter. It is assumed that two manuscripts that are ``close'', in a sense that may be defined by a vector of measures of distance for documents, will have close dates. Using this approach, statistical ideas are used to assess ``similarity'', by smoothing among distance measures, and thus to estimate dates for the 5000 undated manuscripts by reference to the dated ones."

Can we get data?

State and Society in the Early Middle Ages

_Magistra et Mater_ in book form.  (Well, not really.)

"(Attention Conservation Notice: this is an unholy mashup between historical speculation and experience from 23 Things, exacerbated by too much checking footnotes and not enough sleep)."

"GALFRIDUS CHAUCERES LYNES OF PICKE-VPPE"; of which I think the best is "Ich haue the tale of Lancelot yn myn roome. Woldstow rede of yt wyth me?"

"Do people get naked?

Ywis, sum tyme ther ys nakedness and bodye-payntynge, and yet it ledeth nat to the synne of lecherie for the bodye payntynge is moostly pictorial narratifs of the punishementes of purgatorie (and yit sum still falle into errour and sinnes of the flesshe, the which is lamentable but pardonable).

Where can I buy a Pardon?

Pardones are soold at several posiciouns around the feeld. Yf ye aren anticipatinge a particularlie elaborate synne, ye must consult the central pardon offyce."

Simony, celibacy, professionalism, communities of practice...

Spread of Black Death in Europe

A truly outstanding book. You really want to read it.

Just how millenarian was Latin Christendom about the years 1000 and 1033, and did it matter?