A long, comprehensive, and engrossing account of the Middle Ages, from about 1100 AD to Martin Luther. Carroll's very strongly, sometimes excessively, Catholic perspective is probably least unusual here of anywhere in which he wrote. Best read as a complement to Durant's _The Age of Faith_, with a heavier focus on war and specific events where Durant focuses on the arts and social trends.

The one large criticism I'd make, now that I think about it, is that Carroll sort of jumps from major episode to major episode, so that the book reads like a sequence of shorter histories rather than a unified whole. That said, I've never read a history of the Middle Ages that tries to present a narrative of the whole era (two such narratives suggest themselves: the Hohenstaufens versus the Papacy, and the Normans versus the world), so I'm not criticizing him too strongly for it. Suffice it to say that Chesterton was right, though: the medieval ideal "was not tried and found wanting, but found difficult, and left untried." The Middle Ages were _much_ shorter than we imagine they were: only about 450 years, about the same length of time as the Han Dynasty, passed between the Norman Conquest and the Protestant Reformation. ( )