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"We are born and die alone, and are often alone in between. But this is true of all human beings, in their millions. So in another sense we are not alone at all, quite the opposite. To manage other shared problems our species has devised organisms specific to each. The organisms specific to our shared solitudes are religions. Because of the paradox in which they originate, religions have a double character: private and public. There is no clearer example than Christianity. It could never have come into existence without some degree of organization, with its half-dozen early members or, thanks to development of Roman and Jewish traditions, millions. But the whole purpose of the organization was to cultivate, in each member, responses essentially private, known only to God. The public and private elements in Christianity are always in tension, usually a creative one; but sometimes not. Murrays five essays, produced for various occasions, consider different aspects of this tension, creative or otherwise, in the western church between, approximately, the millennium and 1300."

"The importance of the medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis. The monastic superiors of late medieval England ruled over thousands of monks and canons, who swore to them vows of obedience; they were prominent figures in royal and church government; and collectively they controlled properties worth around double the Crowns annual ordinary income. As guardians of regular observance and the primary interface between their monastery and the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective functioning and well-being of the monastic order. This book provides the first detailed study of English monastic superiors, exploring their evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual chapters examine the election of late medieval monastic heads; the internal functions of the superior as the father of the community; the head of house as administrator; abbatial living standards and modes of display; monastic superiors public role in service of the Church and Crown; their external relations and reputation; the interaction between monastic heads and the government in Henry VIII is England; the Dissolution of the monasteries; and the afterlives of abbots and priors following the suppression of their houses. This study of monastic leadership sheds much valuable light on the religious houses of late medieval England, including their spiritual life, administration, spending priorities, and their multi-faceted relations with the outside world. "

""In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange fractured and an era of economic contraction and demographic decline dawned from which Latin Christendom would not begin to emerge until its voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century. In a major new study of this 'Great Transition,' Bruce Campbell assesses the contributions of commercial recession, war, climate change, and eruption of the Black Death to a far-reaching reversal of fortunes from which no part of Eurasia was spared. The book synthesises a wealth of new historical, palaeo-ecological and biological evidence, including estimates of national income, reconstructions of past climates, and genetic analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, to provide a fresh account of the creation, collapse and realignment of Western Europe's late medieval commercial economy"-- Provided by publisher"