Eternal light and earthly concerns

Paul Fouracre is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Manchester

• Introduction1 Beginnings2 Consolidation of provision: elite practice3 Light and power: the ‘Carolingian moment’4 Lighting, lords and peasants in post-Carolingian Europe5 Lights and social formation in the central Middle Ages6 Lights in the later Middle Ages: from devotion to destructionConclusionsIndex

‘[A] meticulously documented survey’.The Journal of Religious History‘Paul Fouracre’s new book is a breath of fresh air. It is a rare historical study that details the “material consequences of belief” in medieval Europe, combining cultural and religious history with a study of medieval economy, agrarian production and trade, and social organisation… To read Fouracre is to witness a master medievalist at work’.English Historical Review'[for] an intellectual historian, this book’s most valuable contribution is that it inspires us to consider the material consequences of the ideas we study, just as it asks economic historians to attend to how ideas and culture may affect production and exchange. Fouracre’s investigation provides a good example of both the potential and the limitations of such an undertaking and provides methodological models. As such, it should be read by everyone interested in the interplay of ideas and social and economic realities.'Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies volume 98, number 1