Hello, can any good folk here recommend a great one-volume book on the Middle ages (ideally later: 900 - 1300 or so). I'm looking for a guide to the society, the art, the people and so on. I generally find radical / socialist views of history the best, so something slanted thatways would be great, but specifically I seek an author keen to celebrate and explain what was so good about this time (in Europe mainly, but also beyond if poss), in terms of conviviality and social freedom, while not flinching from the horrors. So far all I have read is Illich, but he has other concerns, outside straight history, and I would like to explore more. Thanks for your [passing] time.
There are very few works of medieval history with obvious ideological biases, and none that are any good.
With respect to general histories:
Southern, R. W. The Making of the Middle Ages. London: Pimlico, 1993.
Southern, R. W. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. Pelican History of the Church v.2. Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1970.
Tanner, Norman. The Church in the Later Middle Ages. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
Swanson, R.N. Religion and Devotion in Europe c. 1215-1515. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Duffy, Eamon. Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes. 3rd ed. New Haven [Conn.] ; London: Yale Nota Bene/Yale University Press, 2006.
Some more interesting specific studies:
Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
French, Katherine L. The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Smail, Daniel Lord. Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307. 3rd ed. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Kienzle, Beverly Mayne. Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard: Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229. NY: York Medieval Press, 2001.
It deals with the tail end of your requested period, but I highly recommend A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchmann.
I know it's not exactly what you're looking for, but I got a lot out of Alice Stopford Green's book "Town Life in the Fifteenth Century."