This one thousand year history of the civilization of western Europe has already been recognized in France as a scholarly contribution of the highest order and as a popular classic. Jacques Le Goff has written a book which will not only be read by generations of students and historians, but which will delight and inform all those interested in the history of medieval Europe.Part one, Historical Evolution , is a narrative account of the entire period, from the barbarian settlement of Roman Europe in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries to the war-torn crises of Christian Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Part two, Medieval Civilization , is analytical, concerned with the origins of early medieval ideas of culture and religion, the constraints of time and space in a pre-industrial world and the reconstruction of the lives and sensibilities of the people during this long period. Medieval Civilization combines the narrative and descriptive power characteristic of Anglo-Saxon scholarship with the sensitivity and insight of the French historical tradition.

Jacques Le Goff was born in 1924 at Toulon. He taught in a lycee at Amiens in 1950-1 and then held research studentships at Lincoln College, Oxford and the Ecole francaise de Rome. Since then he has taught at the Ecole practique des hautes etudes, rising to the position of president of the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales 1975-7. He is director of the prestigious journal Annales. He has published many books; best known to English readers are Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris 1977), translated as Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980) and La naisssance du purgatoire (Paris 1981), translated as The Borth of Purgatory (Chicago 1984).

Julia Barrow, a medievalist with a special interest in church history, took her MA in St Andrews in 1978 and her D.Phil in Oxford in 1983. At present she holds a British Academy Post-doctoral fellowship at Birmingham University.