At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000

by David Levine

Overview

Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, David Levine investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial routines, new forms of agriculture, new methods of information technology, and increased population densities all played a role in the prolonged transition away from antiquity and toward modernity.

At the Dawn of Modernity highlights both "top-down" and "bottom-up" changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization. In the former category are the Gregorian Reformation, the imposition of feudalism, and the development of centralizing state formations. Of equal importance to Levine's portrait of the emerging social order are the bottom-up demographic relations that structured everyday life, because the making of the modern world, in his view, also began in the decisions made by countless men and women regarding their families and circumstances. Levine ends his story with the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348, which brought three centuries of growth to a grim end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520220584
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/19/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1370L (what's this?)

About the Author

David Levine is Professor of Theory and Policy Studies at the University of Toronto. His previous books include Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (1977), Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (1979), Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (1987), and The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (1992).

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Considering the Subject	1
1.	Lineages of Early Modernization	17
	The Feudal Revolution	17
	Re-forming Christendom	61
2.	Shards of Modernity	107
	Technologies of Power	107
	Sailing on the Tide of History	131
	Positive Feedbacks	148
3.	Living in the Material World	189
	The Seigneurial Mesh	189
	Degrees of Unfreedom	221
4.	Reproducing Feudalism	244
	Thinking with Demography	244
	Strong Stems/Weak Branches	269
	The Limits of Patriarchy	288
5.	Negative Feedbacks	325
	The Bacteriological Holocaust	325
	Luxuriant Despair	338
	The Social Earthquake	375
6.	Recombinant Mutations	401
	After-words	411
	Index	429