Thanks, that one of the seminal articles in my life in adjusting my thinking. I later went on to read a bunch of medievalists; Regine Perroud's Those Horrible Middle Ages, written by a Frenchwoman who knew her stuff and had a great sense of humor, also enlightens.
If you want to read a book that will chip away at the other end of the Dark…
Thanks, that one of the seminal articles in my life in adjusting my thinking. I later went on to read a bunch of medievalists; Regine Perroud's Those Horrible Middle Ages, written by a Frenchwoman who knew her stuff and had a great sense of humor, also enlightens.
If you want to read a book that will chip away at the other end of the Dark Ages, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited makes the argument, first made by Henri Pirenne, that the collapse in Western Europe was due to Islamic Conquests cutting off trade with the east. There's a great historical fact in there that backs up the idea: ancient French Royal records are recorded on papyrus, the cheap, easily-available writing medium that was no longer supplied after the conquest of Egypt. The author claims that this caused an economic collapse because business could no longer record transactions, a little bit like what might happen to us if silicon storage disappeared from the market. Using parchment for ledgers was too costly...
Oh, one other you MUST add to the reading pile: The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. Like the Renaissance, the story of enlightened Islamic Spain is mostly spin and propaganda, and the author, one pissed-off Spaniard, brings the goods.
There was a Dark Age as Jane Jacobs describes it, when the memory of what was lost is lost. But it was ending about the 11th century in the West (except England, where the Roman Collapse left the Island less capable than it had been before Roman Conquest: maybe this influences our idea of darkness, being speakers of Anglo-Saxon languages) and the bright progress was really only stopped by the plague caused by Justinian's Flea, the last great book I'll mention, in 1350.
Thanks, I'll check it out. Right now I'm starting a book on the Holy Roman Empire, which gets short shrift by historians, even though it was a major power throughout the Middle Ages.
Thanks, that one of the seminal articles in my life in adjusting my thinking. I later went on to read a bunch of medievalists; Regine Perroud's Those Horrible Middle Ages, written by a Frenchwoman who knew her stuff and had a great sense of humor, also enlightens.
If you want to read a book that will chip away at the other end of the Dark Ages, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited makes the argument, first made by Henri Pirenne, that the collapse in Western Europe was due to Islamic Conquests cutting off trade with the east. There's a great historical fact in there that backs up the idea: ancient French Royal records are recorded on papyrus, the cheap, easily-available writing medium that was no longer supplied after the conquest of Egypt. The author claims that this caused an economic collapse because business could no longer record transactions, a little bit like what might happen to us if silicon storage disappeared from the market. Using parchment for ledgers was too costly...
Oh, one other you MUST add to the reading pile: The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. Like the Renaissance, the story of enlightened Islamic Spain is mostly spin and propaganda, and the author, one pissed-off Spaniard, brings the goods.
There was a Dark Age as Jane Jacobs describes it, when the memory of what was lost is lost. But it was ending about the 11th century in the West (except England, where the Roman Collapse left the Island less capable than it had been before Roman Conquest: maybe this influences our idea of darkness, being speakers of Anglo-Saxon languages) and the bright progress was really only stopped by the plague caused by Justinian's Flea, the last great book I'll mention, in 1350.
Thanks, I'll check it out. Right now I'm starting a book on the Holy Roman Empire, which gets short shrift by historians, even though it was a major power throughout the Middle Ages.