The Read: Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
Friday's Child is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’m a non-specialist in the field but I’m very interested in Medieval European history. An undergraduate course with Stephen White made me feel very invested in the field early on and my main graduate advisor’s active interest in medievalist and early modernist European historians who drew upon anthropological scholarship drew me into reading the field more intensely, if also narrowly. Plus I’m trying to write some about fantasy literature and its intense referencing of medieval Europe is compelling me to read more work in the field.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes, mostly. Plus, I have to say, the actual material feel of the printing is insane. I mean, the pages feel almost like vellum or parchment. I have no idea how they arranged this, but dayum.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
A good synthesis history has great ongoing value as a touchstone or work of reference. I’ll be curious to see what specialists make of the book, however. (See my comments below.)
Quotes
“But if there are no satisfactory endings, if all moments are close to what came before, why do we imagine there was a Middle Ages at all?”
“We’re going to start by following the travels, wiles, victories and tragedies of Calla Placidia to offer a simple reframing off the fifth century under one premise: Rome did not fall.”
“While the Vikings were capable of extraordinarily terrible violence, they also participated in transregional trading networks, colonized land they thought uninhabited (and both traded and fought with Inuit and other First Nations when they discovered they were mistaken), and built new kingdoms and other states that quickly moved into formal diplomatic relationships with their neighbors.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
There are a lot of familiar history-writing decisions in evidence here that particularly shape works of synthesis. One is to essentially deliver the historiographical tidings to publics that don’t follow the scholarship and announce the death of old paradigms that wider publics may still hold to. Here the dead paradigms are: there were no “Dark Ages” where people forgot learning and were beset by violence and disorder, the Western Roman Empire didn’t really fall, there were no sharp disjunctures at either the beginning or end of the medieval period, Western Europe is not reducible to “Christendom”, and so on. That all seems completely correct to me and it’s very much what medievalists have been arguing for a while, but as the authors themselves note, those kind of moves do pose some conceptual problems at a general level: e.g., then why is this a distinctive period at all? if it has no disjunctive beginning or end and much of the rest of what we think we know is wrong, why not just completely re-periodize and relocate this history? Why not drop “medieval” and “Western Europe” altogether? If the centuries near the gradual end of the period are really different than the centuries near the beginning of it, what’s the storyline of that change over time? What sums it up? (“The Bright Ages” is a great polemical move for getting attention, but surely we’re not going to end up with “this was a much better period than what came before or after”, in a complete inversion of the old story?) I’m not sure the book gives me a new active description of how this is a period and how it is distinct from what came before and after and why “Europe” should be the geographic referent: many chapters are structured to deliver the message that what you have thought is wrong and to provide a replacement account that is accurate, but the accurate account thus ends up tethered to its dark-age mirror rather than becoming something independent of it. I get how hard that is—they point out that even if the Byzantines never called themselves Byzantines and “Viking” means, inaccurately, something like “pirate”, more accurate terms would either have to be multiple or would be confusing to readers. I struggle with similar issues, all historians do (my entire field is organized around a word and a concept that doesn’t apply to much of the history of the places and societies we study, and yet none of us know what to say otherwise). But it does mean that the book reads to some extent as a series of separate responses to older paradigms and stereotypes and doesn’t fully gel as a continuous account on its own.
Another move that the book makes that all historians writing this kind of work have to wrestle with is that (presumably) for ease of readability, it doesn’t have numbered footnotes or endnotes. It’s a bit more than that, though: the main text doesn’t really even discuss the state of existing scholarship in terms of its ongoing debates, in terms of specific authors or influential works, with a couple of exceptions (Charles Homer Haskins gets about a page in a half) etc.: almost all the historiographic discussion is sequestered in a useful and lengthy “Further Reading” section at the end. That’s a common move in books intended for general readerships and in books intended for use in introductory college courses. I have to say that my personal preference is for at least some historiographic conversation in the main text—to talk about methodological problems, active debates between scholars, and the difficulties involved in deciding where the focal point of the narrative ought to be. I think that’s good not just for historians in other fields, but for general audiences, to get a bit more insight into how expert consensus changes (and where there are remaining disagreements or divergences). It also feels to me that only occasionally do they really dig into the problems that historians face in deciding how to read a document—as a literal witness report, as an ideologically-driven fantasy, as an indirect metaphor or allegory, as all (or none) of the above.
It’s mostly a political history where powerful or influential individuals (many of them familiar names) are seen as the primary agents driving the history, with some discussion of economic, social and cultural history, often to provide context for the political history. I think that’s another choice that could use more explicit narration or discussion. Partly for this reason and partly because of a desire to reconceptualize the period as “bright”, it sometimes feels as if there’s not a persistent or perspectivally consistent interest in discussions of causality—I often found myself wondering “well, why did that happen? Why was this era of the ‘Bright Ages’ different than what came before?” and I found myself often having an incomplete sense of the connections between places and events. If a lot of the prior stories about what medieval Europe was that made it a connected place are flawed or incorrect, then what did make it connected? What’s the relationship? Were there any common systems or structures? For example, they mention in the introduction that medievalists have replaced old descriptions of “feudalism” with “complex networks of affinity and hierarchy” that were sometimes “hyperlocal” but I don’t think you’d walk away from reading this with any sense of what those complex networks of affinity and hierarchy were like, hyperlocal or otherwise.
To some extent also, the importance of presentist misconceptions and misuses of medieval history also intervenes in developing a consistent account of how medieval Europeans themselves saw things or understood their lives and times, which at least has seemed to me to be a great strength of a lot of medieval historiography over the last thirty years or so. There’s some discussion of this here and there—for example, in the chapter on the Black Death—but it’s not a strong element of the book. A lot of Northern Europeans, aka Vikings, converted to Christianity between 800 and 1200, they note—but why? What were they thinking? How did things look to them? What did the Althing in Iceland debate when it democratically decided to convert? And so on.
I’m going to be interested to see if other medievalists feel this is a good comprehensive overview of the state of play in the field, or if there are significant portions of the historiography (or historiographical debates) that should have had more attention.
I know these are almost all “I’m reacting to the book I imagine could have been written rather than the one which was” kinds of comments, which are never particularly fair. Certainly this is the book you would hand someone who really was stuck in the old paradigm, though I think (for one example) that the white supremacist types who want to stubbornly insist that England was nothing but white people until the 18th Century and so on aren’t going to be much persuaded by any scholarly work to the contrary. I enjoyed reading the book, and it was useful (the “Further Reading” especially so) but it also isn’t quite what I might have most wanted out of a new synthesis.
You caught my interest with your discussion of the feel of the book. Now I have to order a physical copy so I can find out what you mean, though reading it will probably have to wait for my retirement summer. No mention of gendered analyses here. Not of interest to these authors? Yet it is has been one of the great upheavals in medieval studies over the past three decades or so...