Volume 14, Number 11 · June 4, 1970
What Is to Be Done about Medieval History?
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Quantitative History
edited by D.K. Rowney, edited by J.Q. Graham
Dorsey Press, 488 pp., $5.95
French Rural History
by Marc Bloch
California, 258 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Approaches to the History of Spain
by Jaime Vicens Vives
California, 189 pp., $6.50
Political History
by G.R. Elton
Basic Books, 184 pp., $5.95
Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne
by François Louis Ganshof
Brown University Press, 191 pp., $7.50
Masters, Princes and Merchants
by John W. Baldwin
Princeton, 2 vols, 343 and 287 pp., $22.50 (the set)
The Twelfth Century Renaissance in this review, are listed in footnotes at the appropriate places)
by Christopher Brooke
Harcourt, Brace & World, 216 pp., $2.95 (other recent books on medieval history, discussed more briefly (paper)
What are we to do about medieval history? No serious person would question its importance. What is nearest to us in time is not necessarily most relevant. The traditional Europe of our history books—the Europe of Napoleon and Bismarck, even the Europe of Hitler and Mussolini—is as dead as that of Charles the Great or Frederick Barbarossa, and we may disabuse our minds of the illusion that there is any immediate profit, from the point of view of contemporary affairs, in studying the deflated celebrities of the day before yesterday.
Review, 6970 words
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