This book about poor men and women in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris reveals the other side of the "age of cathedrals" in the very place where gothic architecture and scholastic theology were born. In Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris, Sharon Farmer extends and deepens the understanding of urban poverty in the High Middle Ages. She explores the ways in which cultural elites thought about the poor, and shows that their conceptions of poor men and women derived from the roles assigned to men and women in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis men are associated with...

When Sherry retires and moves to a Sun City, Arizona retirement community, she makes a special friend right in her back yard! She is excited to explore all of the nature of her desert. Right away she begins picking lemons to cook with from her desert lemon tree and soon realizes that with her big sunhat and sunglasses, she not only looks like a spy, but is becoming a spy! Her tree begins to whisper to her and they become fast spy friends! What could they possibly look at all day long? What do they hear at night? And Sherry becomes so close to her tree that she must find just the right name...

For more than one hundred years, from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris was the only western European town north of the Mediterranean basin to produce luxury silk cloth. What was the nature of the Parisian silk industry? How did it get there? And what do the answers to these questions tell us?

According to Sharon Farmer, the key to the manufacture of silk lies not just with the availability and importation of raw materials but with the importation of labor as well. Farmer demonstrates the essential role that skilled Mediterranean immigrants...