Reddit mentions of A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain

Here is a very good read on how Muslims inhabited medieval Spain.

Muslims in medieval Spain, translated Greek works into Arabic and created wealth of knowledge in astronomy, architecture, irrigation, medicine, etc. The transmission of knowledge from Al-Andalus into western Europe after reconquest of Muslim Spain essentially laid the foundation of European Renaissance.

There is also a Great PBS documentary about that period.

Sure. I'm going to side-step your question a little bit because a simple google search will turn up articles and books on these topics - rather, I'm going to give you some cool topics and one or two citations for each. If you're really interested, you could build a reading base out from there.

Disclaimer: I am a history student when I'm not on reddit, so this is going to be from that perspective. I'm sure a scientist could give you an entirely different list, and that's cool too - I just don't know the literature well.

Late Antiquity:

• Most people essentially think that once the Roman empire dissapeared and plunged the work into a dark age, which is, of course, the major fallacy of this graph. The scholarship is very convoluted, but this is a great introduction.
  
  Charlemagne:
  
• McCormick, Origins of the European Economy is getting fairly old now, but I think it is still regarded as the foundational work on the topic. Essentially, the thesis is that rather than being a period of stagnation the 4th-9th centuries were a period of explosive economic development that set the stage for the city revolution of the 10th century and what came after. This is probably going to be a difficult book to find, and it is about 1000 pages long, but if you read it, you will essentially understand the topic as well as a graduate student in history.
  
  Bonus Reading: Hodges and Whitehouse, Muhammad and Charlemagne if you really get off on the economic stuff.
  
  The Medieval World
  
• Another problem with this graph is that it is extremely specific. It lumps a thousand year period together as a "dark age" and it really only focuses on Europe (Eurocentrism is a cardinal sin as far as I'm concerned, and once you see that someone says "the world", but really only means "white people in Europe", you might as well stop reading). BUT, the graph is wrong about Europe too. [This] (http://www.amazon.com/Vanished-World-Muslims-Christians-Medieval/dp/0195311914/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324908631&sr=1-8) book is a great introduction to Spain during the medieval period, and it shows two really important things. (1) Different parts of Europe were different during the medieval period, and almost nowhere were there castles and knights in the sense that we think of them today. (2) The middle ages are complex, they are full of real people and they resist simple categorization.
  
  As a concluding remark, I would just say that one of my professor's once told me that we often make the mistake of thinking that people in history were not as smart as we are today, or that they weren't capable of the same things that we are intellectually. The sooner you realize that this is false, and that the people you study in history could be just like you if they had been born in 1990, the sooner you are on your way to thinking about the medieval world in a productive way.
  
  
  
  
  Sorry this is a bit vague, I'm away from my books for christmas so I don't have everything at hand.