John W. Baldwin (1929–2015)

Knights, Lords, and Ladies was the last work of the eminent medieval historian John Baldwin and was unfinished at his death; the book as published now was brought to completion by another equally distinguished historian of the French Middle Ages, William Chester Jordan. It's a close prosopographical study of the aristocracy of the region immediately around Paris over the period of about a generation; a time when, Baldwin argues, this group was undergoing a period of major change. He looks at show more various aspects of aristocratic life—family structures, housing, use of land and other resources, involvement with religion and the institutional church—primarily through the documentary evidence but also through the use of archaeological evidence, literary sources, and material culture such as seals. Anyone who works on the elite families of this region in the late 12th/early 13th centuries will find this work an invaluable resource.

The book is definitely incomplete. Baldwin wasn't able to respond to the reader's report, and I definitely felt the lack of a conclusion that would have drawn the various strands of his study together. Yet this is still a wonderful testament to Baldwin's career and his mastery of the sources. show less

A solid narrative account of the reign of Philip Augustus combined with a study of the development of governmental institutions and record keeping during Philip's tenure. John Baldwin's command of the sources is impressive, and he convincingly reconstructs the broad outlines of the shifts that happened primarily in the 1190s that would set up the foundations for Capetian governance for the next several generations. This is very much a work for the specialist reader, though—do not start show more here if you're new to medieval history. show less