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› Find signed collectible books: 'After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe'
A work of genuine social history, this book leads the reader, as concretely as possible, into the real v illages and cities of European society. It begins with a des cription of family and community structure, social conflict and religious beliefs. ' [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Death'
'as exciting and readable an account as you could wish' -- The Guardian
The major study of the origins, progress and economic and social effects of the plague throughout Europe in the 14th century. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Death'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Death'
New to the Problems in European Civilization series, this is the only text to contain secondary sources on the Black Death. Organized by cultural, municipal, and medical reaction to the disease, the essays are preceded by helpful introductions to provide students with a context for each source. The text features the latest in scholarship and a flexible format that allows instructors to assign those essays and sections that best suit course needs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Death'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Death: A Turning Point in History?'
More editions of The Black Death: A Turning Point in History?:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe'
A fascinating work of detective history, The Black Death traces the causes and far-reaching consequences of this infamous outbreak of plague that spread across the continent of Europe from 1347 to 1351. Drawing on sources as diverse as monastic manuscripts and dendrochronological studies (which measure growth rings in trees), historian Robert S. Gottfried demonstrates how a bacillus transmitted by rat fleas brought on an ecological reign of terror -- killing one European in three, wiping out entire villages and towns, and rocking the foundation of medieval society and civilization. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'British Population History: From the Black Death to the Present Day'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Burning Road'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Decameron'
In the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories - a hundred stories of love, adventure and surprising twists of fortune which later inspired Chaucer, Keats and Shakespeare. While Dante is a stern moralist, Boccaccio has little time for chastity, pokes fun at crafty, hypocritical clerics and celebrates the power of passion to overcome obstacles and social divisions. Like the Divine Comedy, the Decameron is a towering monument of medieval pre-Renaissance literature, and incorporates certain important elements that are not at once apparent to today's readers. In a new introduction to this revised edition, which also includes additional explanatory notes, maps, bibliography and indexes, Professor McWilliam shows us Boccaccio for what he is - one of the world's greatest masters of vivid and exciting prose fiction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Decameron'
Set against the background of the Black Death of 1348, the hundred linked tales in Boccaccio's masterpiece are peopled by nobles, knights, nuns, doctors, lawyers, students, artists, peasants, pilgrims, servants, spendthrifts, thieves, gamblers, police-and lovers, both faithful and faithless. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio'
Here beginneth the book called Decameron and surnamed Prince Galahalt wherein are contained a hundred stories in the ten days told by seven ladies and three young men. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century'
In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century'
In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Doomsday Book'
Connie Willis labored five years on this story of a history student in 2048 who is transported to an English village in the 14th century. The student arrives mistakenly on the eve of the onset of the Black Plague. Her dealings with a family of "contemps" in 1348 and with her historian cohorts lead to complications as the book unfolds into a surprisingly dark, deep conclusion. The book, which won Hugo and Nebula Awards, draws upon Willis' understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'El Decameron'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time'
A book chronicling one of the worst human disasters in recorded history really has no business being entertaining. But John Kelly's The Great Mortality is a page-turner despite its grim subject matter and graphic detail. Credit Kelly's animated prose and uncanny ability to drop his reader smack in the middle of the 14th century, as a heretofore unknown menace stalks Eurasia from "from the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal [producing] suffering and death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-seven million AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing." Take Kelly's vivid description of London in the fall of 1348: "A nighttime walk across Medieval London would probably take only twenty minutes or so, but traversing the daytime city was a different matter.... Imagine a shopping mall where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road." Yikes, and that's before just about everything with a pulse starts dying and piling up in the streets, reducing the population of Europe by anywhere from a third to 60 percent in a few short years. In addition to taking readers on a walking tour through plague-ravaged Europe, Kelly heaps on the ancillary information and every last bit of it is captivating. We get a thorough breakdown of the three types of plagues that prey on humans; a detailed account of how the plague traveled from nation to nation (initially by boat via flea-infested rats); how floods (and the appalling hygiene of medieval people) made Europe so susceptible to the disease; how the plague triggered a new social hierarchy favouring women and the proletariat but also sparked vicious anti-Semitism; and especially, how the plague forever changed the way people viewed the church. Engrossing, accessible, and brimming with first-hand accounts drawn from the Middle Ages, The Great Mortality illuminates and inspires. History just doesn't get better than that. --Kim Hughes [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made'
One-third of Western Europe's population died between 1348 and 1350, victims of the Black Death. Noted medievalist Norman Cantor tells the story of the pandemic and its widespread effects in In the Wake of the Plague.
After giving an overview, Cantor describes various theories about the medical crisis, from contemporary fears of a Jewish conspiracy to poison the water (and the resulting atrocities against European Jews) to a growing belief among modern historians that both bubonic plague and anthrax caused the spiraling death rates. Cantor also details ways in which the Black Death changed history, at both the personal level (family lines dying out) and the political (the Plantagenet kings may well have been able to hold onto France had their resources not been so diminished).
Cantor veers from topic to topic, from dynastic worries to the Dance of Death, and from peasants' rights to Perpendicular Gothic. This makes for amusing reading, though those seeking an orderly narrative may be frustrated. He also seems overly concerned with rumors of homosexual behavior, and his attempt to link the savage method of Edward II's murder to a cooling in global weather is a bit farfetched.
Cantor wears his considerable scholarship lightly, but includes a very useful critical biography for further reading. While not an entry-level text on the Black Death, In the Wake of the Plague will interest readers looking for a broader interpretation of its consequences. --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Journal Of The Plague Year'
More editions of Journal of the Plague Year:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Journal of the Plague Year'
This Norton Critical Edition of one of Defoes most important works reprints the 1722 text, the only edition published in Defoes lifetime.
The authoritative text has been fully annotated and makes available a perennially popular novel, one that has often been mistaken for an actual eyewitness account of the last great plague in England.More editions of A Journal of the Plague Year:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Journal of the Plague Year: Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'King Death : The Black Death and Its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England'
The black death came to England in 1347 and for three centuries bubonic plague remained a continual and threatening presence in the everyday life (and death) of the country. The Black Death and subsequent population losses are central, therefore, to any understanding of the period.
From rural labourer to nobleman, from village priest to abbot, contemptuous of rank and wealth, Death was the guest of every late-medieval household in 'pestilence time.' In this masterly survey, Colin Platt examines what it was like to live with plague at all levels of society. Drawing on evidence from architecture and the arts, he examines the visible legacies of the investment that Christian men and women made in the provision of after-death soul-care. In addition he examines the social and economic consequences of a steep and unprecedented population decline. It is argued that the severe labour shortage that persisted for over a century after the Black Death ultimately broke the ties of feudal bondage.
Written with verve and rich in detail, King Death offers an important analysis of one of the most potent instruments of change in late-medieval England, and a fascinating insight into the industry of death that pestilence brought with it. It will be required reading for all students of late-medieval England.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'King of Shadows'
Only in the world of the theater can Nat Field find an escape from the tragedies that have shadowed his young life. So he is thrilled when he is chosen to join an American drama troupe traveling to London to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in a new replica of the famous Globe theater.
Shortly after arriving in England, Nat goes to bed ill and awakens transported back in time four hundred years -- to another London, and another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Amid the bustle and excitement of an Elizabethan theatrical production, Nat finds the warm, nurturing father figure missing from his life -- in none other than William Shakespeare himself. Does Nat have to remain trapped in the past forever, or give up the friendship he's so longed for in his own time? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Peste'
La Peste est un roman dAlbert Camus publié en 1947 qui permit en partie à son auteur de remporter le prix Nobel en 1957. Il a pour théâtre Oran durant la période de lAlgérie française. Lhistoire se déroule dans les années 1940. Le roman raconte sous forme de chronique la vie quotidienne des habitants de la ville pendant une épidémie de peste qui frappe la ville et la coupe du monde extérieur. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Plague'
The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Plague On Both Your Houses: The First Chronicle Of Matthew Bartholomew'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Plague Tales'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Plague, the Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth centurytwo novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (19131960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning.
The Plaguewritten in 1947 and still profoundly relevantis a riveting tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The Fall (1956), which takes the form of an astonishing confession by a French lawyer in a seedy Amsterdam bar, is a haunting parable of modern conscience in the face of evil. The six stories of Exile and the Kingdom (1957) represent Camus at the height of his narrative powers, masterfully depicting his charactersfrom a renegade missionary to an adulterous wife at decisive moments of revelation. Set beside their fictional counterparts, Camuss famous essays The Myth of Sisyphus and Reflections on the Guillotine are all the more powerful and philosophically daring, confirming his towering place in twentieth-century thought. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Quicksilver'
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson launches his most ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with the ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for MIT in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to resolving an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the Minerva, readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with young Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early drawings of microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious radicals, and the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and enjoys a lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-all before the year 1700.
In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked" Jack (also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a Turkish harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by Eliza's lust for fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of Daniel in the third book of the novel.
The book courses with Stephenson's scholarship but is rarely bogged down in its historical detail. Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory. Though replete with science, the novel is as much about the complex struggles for political ascendancy and the workings of financial markets. Further, the novel's literary ambitions match its physical size. Stephenson narrates through epistolary chapters, fragments of plays and poems, journal entries, maps, drawings, genealogic tables, and copious contemporary epigrams. But, caught in this richness, the prose is occasionally neglected and wants editing. Further, anticipating a cycle, the book does not provide a satisfying conclusion to its 900 pages. These are minor quibbles, though. Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'When Plague Strikes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'When Plague Strikes'
Compassionate and arresting, this exploration of three major diseases that have changed the course of historythe bubonic plague, smallpox, and AIDSchronicles their fearsome death toll, their lasting social, economic, and political implications, and how medical knowledge and treatments have advanced as a result of the crises they have occasioned. "A book that would serve well for reports, but it is also a fascinating read."SLJ.
Best Books of 1995 (SLJ)
Notable Children's Trade Books in Social Studies 1996 (NCSS/CBC)
1995 Young Adult Editors Choices (BL)
1995 Top of the List Non Fiction (BL)
1996 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
Notable Childrens Books of 1996 (ALA) [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague'
Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The lord of the manor and his family pack up and leave. The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster. The narrator, the young widow Anna Frith, is one of the few who succeeds. With Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, she tends to the dying and battles to prevent her fellow villagers from descending into drink, violence, and superstition. All is complicated by the intense, inexpressible feelings she develops for both the rector and his wife. Year of Wonders sometimes seems anachronistic as historical fiction; Anna and Mompellion occasionally appear to be modern sensibilities unaccountably transferred to 17th-century Derbyshire. However, there is no mistaking the power of Brooks's imagination or the skill with which she constructs her story of ordinary people struggling to cope with extraordinary circumstances. --Nick Rennison, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Years of Rice and Salt'
Award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson delivers a thoughtful and powerful examination of cultures and the people who shape them. How might human history be different if 14th-century Europe was utterly wiped out by plague, and Islamic and Buddhist societies emerged as the world's dominant religious and political forces? The Years of Rice and Salt considers this question through the stories of individuals who experience and influence various crucial periods in the seven centuries that follow. The credible alternate history that Robinson constructs becomes the framework for a tapestry of ideas about philosophy, science, theology, and politics.
At the heart of the story are fundamental questions: what is the purpose of life and death? Are we eternal? Do our choices matter? The particular achievement of this book is that it weaves these threads into a story that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. This is a highly recommended, challenging, and ambitious work. --Roz Genessee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Decamerone'
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