After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Interdisciplinary Studies in History)

Rating:
Summary: European society before the modern age
Review: Huppert provides the best quick introduction to how European society _really worked_ before the industrial age. He starts with the village and the family, then moves to cities, elites, and the way things (slowly, slooooowly) changed.

The book does a great job of combining big slow processes with enough local detail that the reader stays interested. Based mostly on France, but his view applies to all of Continental Europe from 1348 to about 1800.