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The Inheritance Of Rome: Illuminating The Dark Ages, 400-1000 (2009)

by Chris Wickham(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0670020982 (ISBN13: 9780670020980)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Viking Adult

series

Penguin History of Europe

review 1: Wickham is a very active historian specializing in the post-Roman world up to about CE 1,000. This particular volume is part of new European History sponsored by Penguin Press. It is supposedly written for a broad audience but one needs some knowledge of the period. Don't read it for an overview.Wickham's identifies key points and analyzes the impact of these periods of change. Traditionally historians saw the "fall" of the Western Roman Empire as a pivotal moment in history. CE 476 is one of those dates that we all know. In recent decades historians have moved to viewing this date as not that important and stressing the continuation of the Roman world as the political apparatus changed. Wickham takes a slightly different approach. He agrees that 476 had little impa... morect beyond the Roman court in Ravenna, but he attempts to show how the various areas of the Empire developing differently and how each evolved at a different pace. In this approach he also stresses that one needs to look beyond the traditional division of the post Roman world into Western Europe, Byzantium and the Caliphate and recognize the very different different experiences within various regions of these larger groupings.
review 2: Wickham's work on the early middle ages does an excellent job of presenting the reader with the political, cultural, and religious history of the period. He covers a wide geographical range that includes the Middle East and North Africa. At the beginning of the book he does an excellent job of showing the continuities and discontinuities that existed after the Roman Empire. In many ways culture did not drastically change since the barbarians were Romanized, but politically the state fragmented and the tax and trade structure fell apart, which did affect aspects of culture such as architecture. Wickham's coverage of religion, especially the iconoclastic controversy, was also well done. His weakness, as others have pointed out is a large amount of detail with little summarization that attempts to bring things together. Though this, in his view is a strength that maintains the purity of the history, it does make it difficult to retain all the information provided. less

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