Chris Wickham

The Inheritance of Rome is one of those magisterial books that I almost regret reading. Wickham is a senior historian, and he covers 600 years across Europe and the Near East with deliberative detail. His goal is to cast aside the standard view of the period, that they were a Dark Ages where hairy barbarians destroyed the great culture of Rome, and a combination of brutish strongmen and close-minded priests ruled over impoverished dirt farmers for millenia. Contrary to all that, there was a show more lot going on in this period. The Eastern Roman Empire out of Constantinople survived for centuries. The Umayyad Caliphate maintained a military aristocracy on top of a complex multi-faith society across North Africa and the Near East. The Carolingians embarked on a massive moral-political reform that set the pattern for future developments in Europe.

Yet, there are the ugly facts of the period. The population of major cities declined drastically, especially Rome and Constantinople, which as ex-imperial capitals lost their public grain subsidies from agricultural provinces. Other cities suffered similar declines in population. And it's not like the countryside was doing better, as land fell out of cultivation. Material culture fell back almost everywhere to relatively crude local production, with the fine craft centuries of antiquity forgotten. 476 and the replacement of the last Western Roman Emperor with an Ostrogothic rex Odoacer is as a good as date as any for the end, but the classically educated civilian elite of the Roman Empire continued to write to each other in sophisticated Latin for decades. But by 600 or so, this was all gone in the West, as economies devolved into little regional self-sufficiencies.

Wickham's thesis about the inheritance of Rome is one of the public square, a line from the processions and games at Imperial height, the continuation of these traditions in the East, the Islamic public gathering of faith, and the Western idea of the juridical assembly, but it strikes me that these connections are somewhat ad hoc, aside from the idea that a public space exists. Rather, a better measure that Wickham uses is one of political protagonism. A few exceptional states and individuals had the ability to make sweeping conquests and reforms. But mostly, it seems like struggles became ever smaller, over specific locals, the loyalties of a few hundred warriors, wooden huts rather than marble cities. show less

I LOVED the emphasis on tracing the socioeconomics of the region and era before one can look at anything else, most especially the Church. The treatment of women and gender could have used a bit more of a focus on how the patriarchy was structured and what it gained by the systemic subjugation of the female 51% of the population, but maybe other medievalists have tackled that? IDK. I'm also curious about how colonialism/empire worked, but that's probably in another book too.

The overuse of show more the word "underpin" would make a super toxic drinking game, and also makes me think of women's foundation garments every single time, but his argument is valid and speaks to my structuralist heart of hearts. You can't understand a culture or an era or a continent without first studying how its most basic needs were framed and met.

Docking stars for some truly oblique prose, the attempt to cover far too much material in too few pages (bad publisher, give more pages), and for my wanting more on Eastern and non-Italian Southern Europe. show less

Weighing in at more than 800 pages of text and more than 100 of bibliography, Framing of the Middle Ages is worthy of the name "tome." Chris Wickham examines a variety of regions in Western Europe, North Africa and Western Asia which were part of the Roman Empire (together with Denmark and Ireland as non-Roman comparatives) between roughly 400 and 800, looking primarily at the political and economic transformations which occurred in the Empire's aftermath. He uses both documentary and show more archaeological evidence to do this, as well as engaging with a previous historiography which Wickham critiques (rightly, I think) for being too binary and too focused on the "wrong" questions (such as "when did medieval Europe become feudal?" or "were early medieval European societies more Roman or Germanic?"). Wickham instead argues that closer attention should be paid to the particularities of each region, rather than looking for one overarching mechanism of change.

It's a massively ambitious project, therefore, even in a book of this size, and an impressive achievement. Wickham synthesises a huge amount of material, and in a lot of instances (though admitting that I have no expertise in, say, the ceramics of the 7th century Levant) he seems generally to be on the right track.

I do have some quibbles with it, however—there are times when Wickham uses a model derived from one area when considering another, without presenting real justification for why. Issues of gender are ignored—and while, yes, we have very little (direct) evidence about the involvement of women in economic and political activities, there is some, and gender considerations do make a difference in how power is used. Female lordship may not have been often exercised, but it did exist and it was a little frustrating to see it ignored. (Though I'm sure Wickham would argue that it lies outside the scope of the work.) The role of the church, particularly monastic institutions, in the creation and sustaining of socio-economic power, is likewise largely ignored. Wickham frequently points out the dangers of teleological arguments for historical development, but seems to fall into that trap a time or two, and I'm not entirely comfortable with how he characterises social structures in early medieval Ireland or with how he uses anthropological evidence about forms of slavery in Africa as a comparative. (In other words, there are times when I don't think he realises that he's using Western European social structures as defaults, or even that there are forms of social organisation which are not those most familiar to us in the west.)

All in all, definitely a book worth reading if you have an interest in this area, though you'll most certainly want to set aside a chunk of time in order to read it. show less

A necessarily engaging and demanding overview of trends in European medieval history from about 500-1500, complemented by a useful set of maps at various points in time, and some relevant photos of buildings and artworks.
As Wickham says : “my intention is to concentrate on the moments of change and the overarching structures, to show what, in my view, most characterised the medieval period and makes it interesting”.
I read this in concentrated bursts, as it is fairly dense, and for me show more needs to be read a chapter or two at a time this way, as I only have a general knowledge of most of the period, with detailed reading of English history. Nevertheless I found Wickham’s book excellent in providing a largely understandable overview and explanation of the significant changes during this long period.

The strength of the book is also its weakness, in that by seeking to successfully show overall trends in the period (with repeated caveats over the “bumps in the road” of events that create temporary divergence from the trend), the book also demands prior knowledge of the period (or at least aspects), and interest and concentration on the overall trend, rather than the interesting particulars. One’s natural interest in the particular stories of national history have to be held in abeyance, to pursue the arguments for the overarching trends.
As the book cannot provide a narrative story, except with specific examples to make the author’s points to illustrate significant changes, it leaves me wanting to read more. I view this as success and will try to remember to revisit the arguments of this book once I have read more about specific histories. show less