Customer Reviews

After the Black Death, Second Edition: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Interdisciplinary Studies in History)

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Huppert provides the best quick introduction to how European society _really worked_ before the industrial age. He starts with the village and the family, then moves to cities, elites, and the way things (slowly, slooooowly) changed.

The book does a great job of combining big slow processes with enough local detail that the reader stays interested. Based mostly on France, but his view applies to all of Continental Europe from 1348 to about 1800.

The first impression this book makes --- and I read the first edition --- is that the title is horribly misleading. Saying `After the Black Death' implies that the plague is an opening Big Bang, maybe the subject of the first chapter, and the work will then study its impacts, such as the claim that is sometimes made that the pestilence induced a pessimism that lasted for generations. The title implies that the book will in fact explore whether the Black Death made the world grim for decades. Except for a few references to demographics, the slaughter is nowhere to be found.

Much more truthful is the subtitle: A Social History of Early Modern Europe. As such, it is a good introduction, probably one crafted with the college textbook market in mind: it's relatively short, it's a synthesis of other secondary sources more than an original argument, etc.

The work has a strong political economic bent. If the author isn't a Marxist, he's at least been highly influenced by it: much of the book describes economic conflict in which the powerful always triumph: peasants are driven off the land, revolts are always crushed, masters get the upper hand over their journeymen, etc. In short, this book doesn't need the bubonic plague to be grim.

As a result, for the first eight chapters, you might think Dante's Inferno was a documentary. It's only in the chapter `Private Lives' that there is any sense of humanity. There, people come across as genuinely human when engagement ceremonies are described at length.

The Europeans in this book are mainly hostile to organized religion, marry relatively late (mid-20s), have little in the way of extended families, grant women a very high degree of autonomy compared to other contemporary societies, are riven by social inequalities and primarily live in France. Yeah, the book, while claiming to talk about Europe, largely generalizes from a few specific regions, starting with France and then to a lesser extent England, the German lands and the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas. Scandinavia and the Slavic lands apparently were not part of Europe. This raises questions for me about the generalizability of the conclusions.

One of the other reviewers comments on the extensive military history. This is either a dramatic change between editions or the review was added to the wrong page on Amazon. Military history is nowhere to be found in the first edition.

This book is a very enjoyable and colorful description of life from the 1400's to the 1600's. However, if your only knowledge of European history was this book, you would think that history ended in the 1600s with masses of starving naked people lining the roads of burnt villages, while distant cities were filled with no one but idle nobility with their servants and some street venders. Seems a bit too much class warfare too me. During the period of the 1300's to the 1600's there were tremdendous developments in the sciences, technologies, and humanities. This book discusses little of those. Still, it is an excellent description of the effects of changes in warfare on common people. It description on the motivations and benefits of all the societal changes I found to be better described by other books.