Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
Off to a Good Start
By Robert Bartlett
The Birth of Europe
by Jacques Le Goff
Blackwell, 274 pp., $27.95
The territorial extent of the recently enlarged European Union (EU) is astonishingly similar to that of medieval Catholic Christendom. Apart from one or two obvious exceptions, such as Greece (EU but never Catholic) and Switzerland (Catholic in the Middle Ages but not EU), the geography of the one is the geography of the other. The Catholic West Slavs and Hungarians are in, the Orthodox East Slavs are out. France, Germany, and northern Italy form a preponderant core, surrounded by a zone of sometimes less fully integrated peripheries like Britain and Scandinavia. Charlemagne would have recognized this geography, centered as it is on his old stamping grounds around Brussels and Strasbourg.
Review, 3491 words
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