Volume 11, Number 9 · November 21, 1968
Brightening Up the Dark Ages
By R.C. Smail
Death and Life in the Tenth Century
by Eleanor Duckett
University of Michigan, 359 pp., $8.50
The Other Conquest
by John Julius Norwich
Harper & Row, 355 pp., $6.95
The Making of the Christian West, 980-1140
by Georges Duby
Skira (distributed in US by World Publishing Co.), 214, 71 color plates, 40 black and white photographs pp., $21.50
The emergence of Western Europe as an identifiable society in world history is a theme that remains popular with medieval historians, and especially for those writing, as all other authors are, for the interested general reader. It is one that they like to discuss in biological metaphors—life, death, growth, decay. Hence the many books on the birth, or the making, of Europe, the Middle Ages, the Christian West. About the main stages of the process there is general agreement. As the authority of the western Roman empire withered away, so power passed to the leaders of the Germanic peoples who, from the fifth century, took root in the European provinces. Of these peoples, those who established themselves most permanently and imposed themselves most successfully on their neighbors were the Franks, who settled most thickly between the Rhine and the Loire. In the eighth century they were ruled by a dynasty which produced one king of heroic stature, Charlemagne. He was not only a conqueror. He gave the peoples under his rule a fair measure of public order, which was certainly greater than most of them had previously enjoyed. He exercised authority with a degree of Christian responsibility, he expressed his will in legislative and administrative acts intended to apply to all his dominions; under his patronage and that of the clergy of his court there was a revival in things of the mind: education, literature, the conservation of some of the inheritance of the past.
Review, 3389 words
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