Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, David Levine investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial routines, new forms of agriculture, new methods of information technology, and increased population densities all played a role in the prolonged transition away from antiquity and toward modernity.

At the Dawn of Modernity highlights both top-down and bottom-up changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization. In the former category, the Gregorian Reformation took Christianity out of the cloister and into the public sphere, affecting both personal comportment and other crucial aspects of everyday life. Similarly, the imposition of feudalism and the development of centralizing state formations were key components of a growing northwestern European political and cultural system, which came to rival the ancient Mediterranean core.

Of equal importance to Levine's portrait of the emerging social order are the bottom-up demographic relations that structured everyday life. The making of the modern world, in his view, began as much in the decisions made by countless men and women regarding their families and circumstances as it did in the conscious policies of state formation and the unintended consequences of changes in social formations. At the Dawn of Modernity tracks the reproduction of families, as well as the transformation of social relationships, through a dozen generations in this wide-ranging, informed synthesis of modern historical scholarship.

Levine ends this story of early modernization with the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348, which brought three centuries of growth to a grim end. The recovery that got underway a hundred years later and changed the direction of world history by propelling Europe toward global hegemony had its complex and intertwined roots in the social experience of those who lived and died in the three centuries following the year 1000.