Great Readings: Medieval History

A curated bibliography of field-defining monographs, seminal chronicles, and paradigm-shifting studies in Medieval History that transformed how historians conceptualize the pre-modern world.

Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Transformations

Title	Author(s)
The Secret History	Procopius of Caesarea
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750	Peter Brown
Mohammed and Charlemagne	Henri Pirenne
Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800	Chris Wickham

Institutions, Feudalism, and Political Authority

Title	Author(s)
Feudal Society	Marc Bloch
"The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe"	Elizabeth A. R. Brown
The Making of the Middle Ages	R. W. Southern
The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology	Ernst H. Kantorowicz
The Alexiad	Anna Komnene

Title	Author(s)
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error	Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250	R. I. Moore
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women	Caroline Walker Bynum
The Book of the City of Ladies	Christine de Pizan
The Birth of Purgatory	Jacques Le Goff

Crisis, Ecology, and the Late Medieval Transition

Title	Author(s)
The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World	Bruce M. S. Campbell
The Waning of the Middle Ages	Johan Huizinga

The Global Middle Ages and Cross-Cultural Encounters

Title	Author(s)
The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History	Ibn Khaldun
Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350	Janet L. Abu-Lughod
The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255	William of Rubruck
Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354	Ibn Battuta
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa	Michael A. Gomez
The Silk Road: A New History	Valerie Hansen