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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;FitzNigel, post: 2657969, member: 74712&quot;]Grierson, Philip.&nbsp; <i>The Coins of Medieval Europe</i>.&nbsp; Coins in History.&nbsp; London: Seaby, 1991.</p><p>ISBN: 1852640588</p><p>Cost: $200</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]589131[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Grade: A-</p><p><br /></p><p>While Spufford&#039;s <i>Money and its use in Medieval Europe</i> is perhaps the best overview of the medieval economy, Grierson&#039;s <i>Coins of Medieval Europe</i> is the best overview of the coins themselves.&nbsp; Grierson&#039;s book is illustrated throughout with pictures of the coins mentioned in the text (including color plates for gold coins), mostly taken from the FitzWilliam museum collection in Cambridge that he was instrumental in building.&nbsp; A few types mentioned in the text are missing an illustration, but considering the vast number of medieval coins this can almost be forgiven.&nbsp; The text is conveniently broken down into individual chapters by century (with the usual discussion of why periodization is arbitrary), and then sections devoted to the different regions of Europe which produced related coins.&nbsp; Grierson provides necessary background history to place the coins in context, but mostly focuses on the coins themselves and what can be said about their issue.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>The Coins of Medieval Europe</i> is by no means exhaustive, but such a task would be impossible for a single volume (after all, medieval Coinage spans a millennia, and covers an entire continent with no centralized issuing authority).&nbsp; Having said this, the lack of coverage of Byzantine coins takes away somewhat from the all-encompassing nature of the book.&nbsp; Grierson points out that he has written extensively before on Byzantine coinage, and that (at the time he was writing), there was a forthcoming book on Byzantine coins within this same series.&nbsp; Despite this, Byzantium would still have an (albeit small) influence on European coins, and it would have been nice to see them included in the discussion.&nbsp; I suppose the same could be said for Islamic coins, but naturally one has to draw the line somewhere, and Grierson chose to cut out the Greeks with the Arabs.&nbsp; Apart from this, my only other criticism is that the attributions for coins pictured lack a description of obverse and reverse, but this is minor considering one can actually look at the coins.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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