John Boswell's The Kindness Of Strangers

I just finished reading this one and I'm wondering what the general impression of The Kindness Of Strangers is.

I quite liked the book.

It's been a while since I read it but I remember that I enjoyed it quite a lot. It may have been one of the earlier books I read that rebuked the idea of medievals as uncaring people who wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone.

One thing I found is that while it was very informative on it's particular subject, there were enough references to other interesting aspects of Medieval life that weren't given any further detail.

Slavery for example. He keeps mentioning the subject, and I don't remember there being anything on it in the textbooks I read.

It was pretty widespread at least to the end of the 10th century and it's hard to say how much of it continued after that - probably some. It's not like 16th century slavers suddenly appeared out of nowhere. A fair amount of slaves were sold to the Mongols or Arabs in the later MA but that's not my period so I don't know a lot of the details - just that Venice and Genoa were heavily involved.

It's something he's got me curious about now.

For the earlier period McCormick's Origins of the European Economy has a lot of details from a trade standpoint - evidently slaves, timber and furs were about all W Europe had to trade. He tracks it quite a bit. There doesn't seem to have been a lot of slavery within Western Europe - but Western Europeans traded a lot of slaves to Arabs and the East.