Volume 9, Number 6 · October 12, 1967
Born Yesterday
By R.C. Smail
The Birth of Europe
by Robert S. Lopez
M.Evans & Co., 442 pp., $15.00
The Middle Ages is a term of convenience. It denotes an epoch which lay between two others more familiar to our educated ancestors: on the one hand the ancient world, on whose literature their education had been founded, and, on the other, that immediate past of which they and their elders had direct experience. In between lay the dark centuries of barbarism and religion—the Middle Ages. Yet these centuries were not just a middle; there was also an end and a beginning. The end was that of the undivided Roman Empire as it had existed during the first three christian centuries. And when in the fifth century A.D. imperial rule collapsed in the western provinces, then the peoples of those provinces, no longer part of the larger unity of the empire, went their own way. Whatever the divisions which then existed and which still exist among them, these western Europeans had in common enough traditions, beliefs, values, and forms of expression and organization to become a new unit among the world's peoples and civilizations.
Review, 2443 words
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