The Roman Empire and its Transformation
• The Roman Empire at its Height
• The Later Roman Empire
• The Rise of Christianity
• The Life of Apollinaris Sidonius
The Germanic World and its Inheritance
• Thoughts on Reading Beowulf
• The Coming of the Germans
• The Age of Justinian
• Thoughts on Reading Athanasius' Life of Saint
  Anthony and The Rule of Saint Benedict
• The Rise of the Franks
The Making of Medieval Europe
• Early Medieval Law
• The Rise of the Western Church
• The Origins and Expansion of Monasticism
• The Rise and Expansion of Islam
• Thoughts on Reading Sura 8 of the Qu'ran, "The Spoils"
• The Carolingian Empire
• Thoughts on Reading Alcuin's Life of St. Vedastus
• The Fall of the Carolingian Empire
An Era of Decentralization
• Three Views of Feudalism
• The Life of Gerald the Good
The Feudalization and Reform of the Church
• Cluny and Church Reform
• The Life of Gerbert of Aurillac
• The Investiture Conflict
"Feudal" Society and Its Changes
• Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar, El Cid
• Thoughts on Reading The Song of the Cid
• Thoughts on Reading The Song of Roland
• The Peasants: Advances in Agricultural Technology
• The Revival of Commerce and Towns
• The Bayeux Tapestry (Background)
• The First Crusade
The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
• The Troubadours and the Development of Chivalry
• The State of the Nobility
• The Paupers
• Medieval Philosophy
• The Birth of the Universities
The Thirteenth-Century Crystallization
• The Rise of Popular Heresies
• Innocent III and Challenges to the Church
• The Mendicant Friars
• Thoughts on Reading The Little Flowers of St. Francis
• Jofre Isaac and the Weight of Tradition
• Frederick II, Stupor Mundi
• Europe in 1300
The Ordeals of the Fourteenth Century
• The Avignon Papacy
• Thoughts on Reading The Process of Na Prous Bonett (1325)
• The Rise of Capitalism and Decline of the Gilds
• The Great Famine and the Black Death
• The Hundred Years' War
• The Sundering of Society
• The Great Schism
• The Rise of the National Monarchies
• Thoughts on Reading The Life of Margery Kempe of Lynn
The End of an Era and the Dawn of a New Age
• Europe on the Eve of Discovery
• The Discovery of the New World and End of the Old
• Some Achievements of Medieval Europe

Please take into consideration the purpose and audience for which the lecture notes listed above were written. For a good many years, I taught a three-credit-hour freshman survey entitled Introduction to Medieval History to enrollments of room-size - generally three hundred students. During those years, the University of Kansas maintained an open enrollment policy in which all graduates from accredited Kansas high schools were admitted to the University. Since the only history courses required by the State of Kansas at the secondary level were in American History, students enrolling for this course varied widely in their knowledge of the European past.

Consequently, my lectures were both basic and episodic, concentrating on major events and topics that would prepare the students for further enrollments in Humanities courses and attempting to demonstrate that the study of History could be both useful and enjoyable. Thus the lectures listed below deal with basic issues and are intended only to offer a background for further study of the subject.

Those lectures entitled Thoughts on Reading . . . are an exception to this characterization. They were written to guide students in an honors course of some thirty students in some useful techniques in reading primarily literary source materials. They were intended to stimulate thought, not to explain the significance of the students' readings.

Having put these materials on-line during the two or three years before my retirement in 1998, I left them in place and soon received comments and suggestions from people who were using them to supplement the materials of courses in Medieval History that they were taking at other universities or were simply reading for pleasure. I found it quite pleasant to think that my materials were continuing to instruct and perhaps even providing some enjoyment even though I was no longer actively teaching, so I have undertaken to improve the format and contents of these offerings and will add to them as I find time to do so.

I might add that I assert no proprietary interest in these materials but offer them freely for public use. You may copy them, reproduce them, or do whatever you wish with them non-commercially. I hope that, whatever use you may make of them, they will prove of some value to you.

Dr. Lynn H. Nelson
Professor Emeritus, Medieval History
University of Kansas
1 January 2001