Matthew Gabriele

A lively overview of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean world between roughly 400 and 1400. Matthew Gabriele and David Perry bring together many of the findings and trends of current scholarship on medieval history, and while there won’t be anything surprising for specialists in the Middle Ages here, I think a general audience will find much of interest here about a period that was much more interconnected and curious than popular understandings often allow for. Gabriele and Perry show more do a good job of showing how medieval Europe wasn’t lily white or religiously homogeneous, and of demonstrating just how much power medieval women could wield, albeit within certain gender norms.

(And these popular understandings are firmly entrenched, indeed. It’s fascinating to me how many of the reviews for The Bright Ages on GoodReads are clutching their pearls over what they see as Gabriele and Perry arguing for the medieval period as some sort of misunderstood Golden Age, the inverted photo negative of the Dark Ages myth. I mean, they hit the reader over the head a bit too much with the phrase “the Bright Ages” for my liking, but that’s a wilful misreading of their point of view for me. This is not an apologia. They’re clearly arguing for us to see medieval people as people, not as either Monty Python grotesques or the Font of Western Civilization.)

There are a couple of minor factual slips (someone is referred to as Turkish who is better described as Turkic; no such thing as the Year 0) and some cultural references that are already dated (not that I’m even sure how many people outside of the U.S. are even aware of the musical Hamilton). But on the whole, I think this is an engaging work which will be accessible to the general reader—one which opens up a door to the distant past and lets the light flood in. show less

Oathbreakers is the second book I've read by these authors and I enjoyed the intricate writing and detailed descriptions of the time period. Although I am very familiar with Charlemagne and the havoc his sons and grandsons set in motion after his death, the authors did a great job at bringing a fresh perspective to the details of the time period. For anyone familiar with the time period, I don't think this book offers anything new, but it does offer a clear insight into the causes and show more consequences of what happened. I definitely liked the more human perspective; it's always easy to say in hindsight that such and such should have been done, but the authors did a great job to show the humanness of the actions and choices that people made, not realizing until much later the impact those choices would have on future events and people.

This book is definitely written for those who don't have a lot of knowledge about the time period, so the authors take a different approach in their writing than is usual in non-fiction history books, more of a chatty approach, one meant to feel as if they are talking to you or lecturing you. For the most part this didn't bother me, but there were times when it drove me crazy, especially during the more serious parts of the book when I felt like the subject material was too serious for this 'chattiness'. Maybe having a history background kind of affected my feelings about this as I am used to a more serious approach, but there were times when I just wanted the authors to go much more in-depth and talk about how serious the situation actually was as those moments definitely impacted those places for generations to come. The lighter tone just didn't always match the situation.

That being said however, the authors did do a great job of outlining the Carolingians and the impact they had on the time period. This is definitely not an easy story to tell and outline so I appreciated the cohesiveness of what was done in this book. And trying to keep all the names straight is no easy feat when half of them are names Louis or Charles or Pepin or something similar. I also liked how the authors mentioned a bit about the societal structure and the impact the wars would have had on starvation and disease over the years, although little is known about the farmers and other people who did not serve at court. Unless there is stash of papers hidden somewhere, there is a lot we will never know and the authors constantly mention the sources from which they gain their information as well as the reliability of those sources. In some instances, we just don't know why some people were at odd with each other and can only speculate based on future actions.

Verdict
Oathbreakers provided a fascinating look into this medieval time period. I was particularly fascinated by the relationships, especially those of the daughters who spent their entire life at court, had affairs and children out of wedlock, but influenced a lot of wealthy people nonetheless yet paid the consequences for those relationships. And what happened to Judith of Bavaria as well as Dhuoda just made the reader realize how much women sacrificed for their children or were victims of the political struggles. The authors did a great job bringing this time period to life and provided perspective for actions and decisions that were made, but there is no question the idiocy of the nobility were responsible for a lot of death and destruction that very much impacted the development of Europe. I know people like to ascribe certain people as being 'heroes', but I liked how the authors showed a different side to that perception and really make you think about who you venerate. show less

The Bright Ages is ambitiously subtitled “A New History of Medieval Europe”. Realistically, it’s an overview of European history from the mid 400s to the early 1300s viewed through a new lens - a modern understanding that does away with the darkness of the “Dark Ages”. An overview is all you can expect for a 250 page book that attempts to cover 1000 years of history. Nevertheless, it’s a useful guide to modern thinking about medieval times.

Contemporary historians have told us for show more several years now that “Dark Ages” is a misnomer. Gabriele and Perry, a medieval historian and a journalist/historian respectively, don’t think we’ve quite gotten the message. This book is their attempt to address that.

The authors tell us that eras of history don’t simply start and end - you can’t pick a specific date, let alone a year, and say “medieval times started here”, or “ended here”. Despite that, they offer their own time-based framing. The Bright Ages, they say, started around the year 430 AD with the building of a chapel at Ravenna at the behest of Galla Placidia, sister of a Roman emperor and queen of the Visigoths. They ended with the writing of Dante’s Inferno in the early 1300s.

In between those endpoints the book focuses each of its seventeen chapters on a different place and time, as a way of illuminating different topics. The continent from Spain to Constantinople, and from Britain to Rome is covered. The Crusades are explored. The interaction of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars are discussed. The rise of the Papacy as both a religious and secular power center is described. The role of women; the rise of universities; the presence of non-white people in Europe; the rise of the Vikings; and much more are all touched on.

The tone of the book is conversational and it's likely the authors had undergrads or others with little exposure to medieval history as their target audience. For them it would be a great starting point. For others who have read or studied the Middle Ages, it’s a well done, modernized refresher, with the understanding that, as an overview, it necessarily leaves out topics, people and events.

The reframing of this history includes some modern notions that have raised objections from others who have read the book. Included in the author’s framing is a modern understanding that refutes the rationale of Gibbon and other nineteenth century historians who wrote in the time of Empires. Such historians built a history of the West that was bound to rise up and take its rightful place as the successor to the Roman Empire, thus almost necessitating a “dark age” in between.

The authors take the further step of tying their earlier histories to their times, which include the invention of race and of white supremacy that undergirded the nineteenth century Empires they lived in. Their notion of a “Dark Ages”, the authors say, implied a time about which we know little, and allowed modern people, like those earlier historians, to project their own notions backwards into the past. The authors express their concern that these projections include misunderstandings of medieval times that support notions of white supremacy. This is all discussed in the book, and has discomfited some readers.

It is true that the discussion is not part of the history of the Middle Ages itself, which seems to be the main objection I’ve seen. But, as the premise of the book is to frame the modern understanding of medieval times, it strikes me that the discussion is not out of place in this book.

For me, this book was an interesting, well written overview of the brightness of medieval times. I give The Bright Ages Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. show less

During the Dark Ages (as you may know them), Europeans were actually doing all kinds of things, including interacting with Africa and Asia, developing religion and culture, and both fighting and trading amongst themselves, not just going on Crusades and killing Jews (though they did a fair amount of those things too). Leans too hard on repeating “the Bright Ages” for my taste, and focuses on kings and queens more than ordinary people, but I thought it fit interestingly with David show more Graeber’s last book about how the quiet/meaningless/unrecorded periods of history might well have been better, and more meaningful, for the average person than the nearby exciting/war-filled times. show less