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History. Philosophy. Nonfiction. HTML: "The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come....The Bright Ages is a rare thing�??a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading."�??Slate "Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating." �??The Boston Globe A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality�??a brilliant reflection of humanity itself. The word "medieval" conjures images of the "Dark Ages"�??centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors. The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante�??inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy�??writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today. The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world "lit only by fire" but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics. The Bright Ages contains an 8-pa… (more)
User reviews
The book is intended for non-specialists, so the authors didn't include footnotes. (There is a "Further Reading" section at the end.) Frankly, there were times when the authors drew conclusions that I would really, really liked to have seen references for.
But all in all, it's a good introduction to the period, well- and entertainingly written.
Some of that is structural. The book begins by making the claim that the Roman empire never really fell, and then proceeds to argue this, somewhat convincingly, for several chapters. And then… it just changes topics
The book wants to center women and
The authors want to show that the Dark Ages were actually the Bright Ages… but then proceed to discuss the slow fragmentation of what was the Roman Empire (even broadly construed) and how even the people alive at the various times were aware that has lost so much (and long after they had stopped thinking of themselves as Roman.)
And then we dash across the Middle East, Central Asia, touch on China…
Some of my frustration comes from the premise, the conceit even, of the book: here is a new vision, a bold retelling… Yeah, brah, bold revisionism is a whole damn genre at this point. Trade and migration tied the world together from ancient times until now; women played often ignored roles but were nonetheless integral; brown- and black-skinned peoples moved into and out of Europe, in varying degrees, for varying lengths of time, with numerous impacts… forever. The Black Death banged around for a while, it wasn’t a couple of years or even a decade, and it traversed Eurasia from east to west, sparing no one. Greek classics re-entered Europe through Arabic translations.
Cities existed during the Dark Ages (and some even grew.)
I mean… yeah, dude. No sh@t. Maybe that means I’m educated, or maybe it means some other people are just massively uneducated, but none of this is new. I’d argue that this is all… very… mainstream.
And, yes, it all bears repeating, because “Europe in the Dark Ages” = “Pallid Wasteland” casts a long shadow. As do assumptions that up until circa 1500 everyone (i.e. all races) were in their own hermetically sealed regions.
But this ain’t new.
And I also suspect that marchers protesting The Great Replacement in Virginia in 2016 -who seem like the primary impetus and target of this book- are not going to read this, and would be unconvinced if they did.
All that said, the book was a fairly quick, if uneven, read. The authors' love of the subject come through, and the anecdotes were interesting (and, yes, even ‘new’ to me.) 3-ish stars, with some hesitation at not giving it 4.
Now, a few observations. The "Dark Ages" lable is a bit of a straw man: it's a long time since any serious historian treated the thousand years from 400 to 1400 as a uniformly closed (or uniformly anything) era. And I think the author goes a bit far in downplaying the inward turn and economic and cultural shrinkage that took place in the early part of the era. This was a period about which only a limited amount is actually known, because of the shortage of original texts. BUT the book is still extremely interesting, shifting the reader's focus from internal European developments to the linkages between Europe and the rest of the world. As a long-time reader of history, the change in viewpoint is vividly clear to me, and has a lot to do with how we are rethinking the past in general. The prose is easily readable (in contrast to too much of current historical writing). For some tastes, indeed, it may be a bit too popular. Still, a book worth reading.
This is intended for a popular audience, and scholars of medieval history won't find anything surprising or groundbreaking here. But for non-academics, this provides a very good overview of current
Gabriele and Perry are also trying to argue against the version of the Middle Ages that has been adopted by white supremacists and fascists in the past several years, even directly calling out the use of Viking imagery at white supremacist rallies. They make the case that history is important, and that we need to understand history to understand current events.