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The Middle Ages by Fried, Johannes (2015) Hardcover
Since the fifteenth century, when humanist writers began to speak of a middle period in history linking their time to the ancient world, the nature of the Middle Ages has been widely debated. Across the millennium from 500 to 1500, distinguished historian Johannes Fried describes a dynamic confluence of political, social, religious, economic, and scientific developments that draws a guiding thread through the the growth of a culture of reason.Beginning with the rise of the Franks, Fried uses individuals to introduce key themes, bringing to life those who have too often been reduced to abstractions of the medieval monk or knight. Milestones encountered in this thousand-year traversal include Europe's political, cultural, and religious renovation under Charlemagne; the Holy Roman Empire under Charles IV, whose court in Prague was patron to crowning cultural achievements; and the series of conflicts between England and France that made up the Hundred Years War and gave to history the enduringly fascinating Joan of Arc. Broader political and intellectual currents are examined, from the authority of the papacy and impact of the Great Schism, to new theories of monarchy and jurisprudence, to the rise of scholarship and science.The Middle Ages "is full of people encountering the unfamiliar, grappling with new ideas, redefining power, and interacting with different societies. Fried gives readers an era of innovation and turbulence, of continuities and discontinuities, but one above all characterized by the vibrant expansion of knowledge and an understanding of the growing complexity of the world.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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About the author
Johannes Fried
42 books12 followersJohannes Fried was, until his retirement, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Frankfurt.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
September 9, 2015
This is a wonderful history of the thousand years between 500 and 1500. If you have an interest in any aspect of that era, be it history of monarchies, art, architecture, religion, philosophy, economics or political thought, Johannes Fried has something for you.
There are two things going on in this book: It is a polemic against the idea that the Middle Ages were "Dark". It is also a detailed panorama of a thousand years of the ups and downs of European history which demonstrates the slow but steady climb of the human project, with winners and losers, from the rubble of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the era of the Reformation. Fried's love and grasp of his subject matter comes through on every page. He really is that favourite professor who manages to mesmerize the class with every lecture.
As for his polemic, Fried wants to finally put down the myth that there was a period properly described as the "Dark Ages" in Europe. Although others have put this same argument forward in the past, Fried does it with passion.
Rather than interrupt the flow of the panorama with the polemic, Fried has saved it for the Epilogue. There he systematically chases down the false theory, complete with arch-villain.
The villain? None other than the most famous son of Königsberg - Immanuel Kant. It was Kant in "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" in 1764 who put forward the idea that any concept of the 'beautiful' died with the arrival of the 'Barbarians' in Rome in 410 C.E. And that from then on until the beginning of the So-called Renaissance, very little happened in Europe with regard to the arts and rational thought. Kant basically saw his own project, and that of his colleagues, as being grounded in the works of the Ancients, the Greeks and the Romans.
"In fact, all Kant did was rely upon collective prejudices and on a fallacious cultural memory. He only had a vague conception floating through his mind's eye of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the point when things changed for the better. However, unfounded theories are not merely groundless, they are above all uncritical. Indeed, they are akin to a state of irrational immaturity."
Kant as a representative of "irrational immaturity" - a new concept. Fried is not being malicious here. He just wants to demonstrate that Kant too was a product of his time and place. Kant's view of history was blinded by his own place in that history. He did not, could not, realize that the shoulders upon which he stood were not just those of Greeks and Romans, but of another thousand years of human struggle.
Fried wants his readers to know that the 'sacking of Rome' by Alaric in 410 C.E., while perhaps putting the final nail into the coffin of the Empire as such, did not destroy Rome nor her heritage. Learning and rational thought, arts and struggling forms of science, laws and political change continued their slow progress. Yes, there were constant wars and intrigues, plagues and natural disasters, but these had existed under the Empire and continue today.
I love this book as a wonderful example of good academic work. If you want to have a firm knowledge of what was happening during the thousand years of the Middle Ages, to have a sense of where those kings and queens lived and died, to know what all those wars and intrigues were about and to know why Germany and Italy took hundreds of years longer to achieve unity and nationhood than France and England, read the book.
If you just want to read the polemic, take the book out of a library and read the last 20 pages - they're enlightening - but then you'll probably want to read the whole book.
A couple of small complaints. The translation is sometimes a bit rough and there are minor typos. If you read German, my fault here, go for it. Then there are the names. Too many kings, princes, counts named Charles. Even those not named Charles renamed themselves Charles to become king. For a book like this, I would prefer "Charles", "Karl", "Carlo" and "Carlos" where appropriate. Easier to keep track.
There are two things going on in this book: It is a polemic against the idea that the Middle Ages were "Dark". It is also a detailed panorama of a thousand years of the ups and downs of European history which demonstrates the slow but steady climb of the human project, with winners and losers, from the rubble of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the era of the Reformation. Fried's love and grasp of his subject matter comes through on every page. He really is that favourite professor who manages to mesmerize the class with every lecture.
As for his polemic, Fried wants to finally put down the myth that there was a period properly described as the "Dark Ages" in Europe. Although others have put this same argument forward in the past, Fried does it with passion.
Rather than interrupt the flow of the panorama with the polemic, Fried has saved it for the Epilogue. There he systematically chases down the false theory, complete with arch-villain.
The villain? None other than the most famous son of Königsberg - Immanuel Kant. It was Kant in "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" in 1764 who put forward the idea that any concept of the 'beautiful' died with the arrival of the 'Barbarians' in Rome in 410 C.E. And that from then on until the beginning of the So-called Renaissance, very little happened in Europe with regard to the arts and rational thought. Kant basically saw his own project, and that of his colleagues, as being grounded in the works of the Ancients, the Greeks and the Romans.
"In fact, all Kant did was rely upon collective prejudices and on a fallacious cultural memory. He only had a vague conception floating through his mind's eye of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the point when things changed for the better. However, unfounded theories are not merely groundless, they are above all uncritical. Indeed, they are akin to a state of irrational immaturity."
Kant as a representative of "irrational immaturity" - a new concept. Fried is not being malicious here. He just wants to demonstrate that Kant too was a product of his time and place. Kant's view of history was blinded by his own place in that history. He did not, could not, realize that the shoulders upon which he stood were not just those of Greeks and Romans, but of another thousand years of human struggle.
Fried wants his readers to know that the 'sacking of Rome' by Alaric in 410 C.E., while perhaps putting the final nail into the coffin of the Empire as such, did not destroy Rome nor her heritage. Learning and rational thought, arts and struggling forms of science, laws and political change continued their slow progress. Yes, there were constant wars and intrigues, plagues and natural disasters, but these had existed under the Empire and continue today.
I love this book as a wonderful example of good academic work. If you want to have a firm knowledge of what was happening during the thousand years of the Middle Ages, to have a sense of where those kings and queens lived and died, to know what all those wars and intrigues were about and to know why Germany and Italy took hundreds of years longer to achieve unity and nationhood than France and England, read the book.
If you just want to read the polemic, take the book out of a library and read the last 20 pages - they're enlightening - but then you'll probably want to read the whole book.
A couple of small complaints. The translation is sometimes a bit rough and there are minor typos. If you read German, my fault here, go for it. Then there are the names. Too many kings, princes, counts named Charles. Even those not named Charles renamed themselves Charles to become king. For a book like this, I would prefer "Charles", "Karl", "Carlo" and "Carlos" where appropriate. Easier to keep track.
March 19, 2016
Fried does a solid job arguing that the middle ages were not the irrational, cloistered, dark times that some vanishingly small number of early modern historians tell us they were; he preaches, I am the choir. That aspect of the book is salutary, but not particularly novel. It's also ironic that Fried, so zealous to protect the middle ages, does to late antiquity exactly what modern historians did to the middle ages: for him, the tribes of Europe really are just barbarians, wandering around with clubs, looking for some enlightened Roman to bludgeon.
To say I was disappointed by the chapters on the early middle ages would, then, be a bit of an understatement. But once we get to Charlemagne, things pick up, and thereafter this is a very good, broad history. Anglophone readers, like me, probably know more about the English (or perhaps French) middle ages than we need to, and a good deal less about the Germanic than we should; the fact that Fried is, well, German, means that his focus is a little further East than that of most historians I've read, and I found that very pleasant. A more interesting polemic than the "they just weren't the dark ages" argument is his revision of the HRE's most famous men: Frederick Barbarossa gets cut down to size, as does Frederick the Great. That's interesting stuff. But the hit-job on Kant, who gets almost all the blame for the Dark Ages fallacy, is incredibly silly, and shows that German historians are no less provincial than the English (who are more likely to blame Gibbon for this kind of thing).
The book has gone through a number of editions in German, and that shows--there's a touch too much repetition, and some clunky structures. The translation is readable, but nobody would mistake it for a book written in English; this is an Englished German book, with lots of strange constructions and inversions. But overall, this is a good history, that I could recommend.
I could, except that some combination of the translator, the editor, and the editorial board at Harvard have turned a good piece of scholarship into a remarkable shit-show of incompetence. This book was published under the mysteriously prestigious 'Harvard Belknap' imprint, which means high-quality paper, high-quality images, and a wonderful physical object (none of that two pieces of cardboard pasted together by a slim piece of fabric nonsense here; this is an honest-to-god hardcover book). Despite this, they apparently couldn't find the money they needed for a proof-reader of any ability whatsoever. I'd suspect, if the thought wasn't so impossible, that someone accidentally uploaded an early draft and then printed it, instead of a finished product.
My first inkling of this came when Gregory the Great's Dialogues are said to be a biography of St. Benedict. You might think that "dialogues" is an odd title for such a work, and of course you'd be right; a life of St. Benedict is included in Gregory's work. I complained about this to my wife, who suggested I was turning into/already was the worst, silliest kind of disconnected intellectual. Fair enough.
But there are other things that you don't have to be an ivory tower flower to abhor. Here is the entirety of note 32 from chapter 10:
32. "Letter to Posterity," see note 32 in this chapter.
David Foster Wallace couldn't have done a better endnote than that!
Ptolemy, who possibly co-authored a political tractate with Aquinas, has his name spelled differently in different chapters. Not a huge problem, but consistency isn't that hard, really.
And nor is, or nor should be, spotting typos. By chapter 11 I was so infuriated that I decided to record them. Here is my list:
"Several factors may have some into play here" [some for come]
"So it was that in Paris, the old emperor, accompanied by his son Wencelas (who had already been crowned 'kind of the Romans,' and his nephew" [the parenthesis is never closed]
"Finally, the territories of the House of Luxembourg were split: in Bohemia and the empire" [ambiguous--they were split in both Bohemia and the empire, but this sentence makes it sound like they were split between them]
"Only Aragon put off deciding in favor of one or other of the popes; the reasons for this lay in the special problems facing its king, Peter IV, 'El Ceremonios' as he would later be called, was seeking to impose a stricter order upon his realm" [the comma before Peter should be a period]
"theoretical deliberations, formulated by one of hte most important political writers of the Middle Ages Francesc Eiximenis" [missing comma before Francesc]
"Eiximenis placed the cosa publica, and the communitat of the realm above the king" [unnecessary comma after publica]
"He declared the Corts to be the appropriate court of law... and that it even had the power, should the monarch transgress against the country's laws--to dismiss the king from his post." [unnecessary m dash, although it does add an odd, Nietzschean vibe to the sentence]
"The crown of Aragon had this passed the zenith of its power" [this for thus]
"The social consequences of such a doctrine were only a matter of time." [I'm glad they weren't a matter of economics or culture, anyway]
"Things were going badly in England was Ball's message, spread by Froissart, and would continue to do so" [Confusing inversion of 'Things...' and 'Ball's message, spread by Froissart']
"they were declared heretics and threatened with being burned at the stake, This did little to deter them" [comma before 'This' instead of a period]
"The terrifying first-hand experience of death also held sway elsewhere" [pretty sure he means 'second-hand' experience, given that he goes on to quote someone]
The Decameron unfolds "against this dismal backcloth" [in English, we say backdrop]
"there is no longer any sense of Death being a force that liberates man from the Vale of Tears that every soul once believed that it was condemned to suffer here below" [at this point I started noting impossibly awkward sentences, too]
"the first great break with normality that changed everything was the Black Death" [huh?]
"Charles V of France not only had the Louvre extended but also fortified, and also built the Bastille, which would later become the symbol par excellence of the oppression of the French people." [Awkward]
You think I'm being too hard? That I'm deliberately trying to find proof-reading errors, which don't really affect anyone's reading of a book? I harvested this crop between page 427 and 447. These pages are entirely representative of the book as a whole.
Harvard UP: hire me. I'm looking for work, and I can pretty obviously do this better than whoever's doing it now.
To say I was disappointed by the chapters on the early middle ages would, then, be a bit of an understatement. But once we get to Charlemagne, things pick up, and thereafter this is a very good, broad history. Anglophone readers, like me, probably know more about the English (or perhaps French) middle ages than we need to, and a good deal less about the Germanic than we should; the fact that Fried is, well, German, means that his focus is a little further East than that of most historians I've read, and I found that very pleasant. A more interesting polemic than the "they just weren't the dark ages" argument is his revision of the HRE's most famous men: Frederick Barbarossa gets cut down to size, as does Frederick the Great. That's interesting stuff. But the hit-job on Kant, who gets almost all the blame for the Dark Ages fallacy, is incredibly silly, and shows that German historians are no less provincial than the English (who are more likely to blame Gibbon for this kind of thing).
The book has gone through a number of editions in German, and that shows--there's a touch too much repetition, and some clunky structures. The translation is readable, but nobody would mistake it for a book written in English; this is an Englished German book, with lots of strange constructions and inversions. But overall, this is a good history, that I could recommend.
I could, except that some combination of the translator, the editor, and the editorial board at Harvard have turned a good piece of scholarship into a remarkable shit-show of incompetence. This book was published under the mysteriously prestigious 'Harvard Belknap' imprint, which means high-quality paper, high-quality images, and a wonderful physical object (none of that two pieces of cardboard pasted together by a slim piece of fabric nonsense here; this is an honest-to-god hardcover book). Despite this, they apparently couldn't find the money they needed for a proof-reader of any ability whatsoever. I'd suspect, if the thought wasn't so impossible, that someone accidentally uploaded an early draft and then printed it, instead of a finished product.
My first inkling of this came when Gregory the Great's Dialogues are said to be a biography of St. Benedict. You might think that "dialogues" is an odd title for such a work, and of course you'd be right; a life of St. Benedict is included in Gregory's work. I complained about this to my wife, who suggested I was turning into/already was the worst, silliest kind of disconnected intellectual. Fair enough.
But there are other things that you don't have to be an ivory tower flower to abhor. Here is the entirety of note 32 from chapter 10:
32. "Letter to Posterity," see note 32 in this chapter.
David Foster Wallace couldn't have done a better endnote than that!
Ptolemy, who possibly co-authored a political tractate with Aquinas, has his name spelled differently in different chapters. Not a huge problem, but consistency isn't that hard, really.
And nor is, or nor should be, spotting typos. By chapter 11 I was so infuriated that I decided to record them. Here is my list:
"Several factors may have some into play here" [some for come]
"So it was that in Paris, the old emperor, accompanied by his son Wencelas (who had already been crowned 'kind of the Romans,' and his nephew" [the parenthesis is never closed]
"Finally, the territories of the House of Luxembourg were split: in Bohemia and the empire" [ambiguous--they were split in both Bohemia and the empire, but this sentence makes it sound like they were split between them]
"Only Aragon put off deciding in favor of one or other of the popes; the reasons for this lay in the special problems facing its king, Peter IV, 'El Ceremonios' as he would later be called, was seeking to impose a stricter order upon his realm" [the comma before Peter should be a period]
"theoretical deliberations, formulated by one of hte most important political writers of the Middle Ages Francesc Eiximenis" [missing comma before Francesc]
"Eiximenis placed the cosa publica, and the communitat of the realm above the king" [unnecessary comma after publica]
"He declared the Corts to be the appropriate court of law... and that it even had the power, should the monarch transgress against the country's laws--to dismiss the king from his post." [unnecessary m dash, although it does add an odd, Nietzschean vibe to the sentence]
"The crown of Aragon had this passed the zenith of its power" [this for thus]
"The social consequences of such a doctrine were only a matter of time." [I'm glad they weren't a matter of economics or culture, anyway]
"Things were going badly in England was Ball's message, spread by Froissart, and would continue to do so" [Confusing inversion of 'Things...' and 'Ball's message, spread by Froissart']
"they were declared heretics and threatened with being burned at the stake, This did little to deter them" [comma before 'This' instead of a period]
"The terrifying first-hand experience of death also held sway elsewhere" [pretty sure he means 'second-hand' experience, given that he goes on to quote someone]
The Decameron unfolds "against this dismal backcloth" [in English, we say backdrop]
"there is no longer any sense of Death being a force that liberates man from the Vale of Tears that every soul once believed that it was condemned to suffer here below" [at this point I started noting impossibly awkward sentences, too]
"the first great break with normality that changed everything was the Black Death" [huh?]
"Charles V of France not only had the Louvre extended but also fortified, and also built the Bastille, which would later become the symbol par excellence of the oppression of the French people." [Awkward]
You think I'm being too hard? That I'm deliberately trying to find proof-reading errors, which don't really affect anyone's reading of a book? I harvested this crop between page 427 and 447. These pages are entirely representative of the book as a whole.
Harvard UP: hire me. I'm looking for work, and I can pretty obviously do this better than whoever's doing it now.
December 4, 2023
Ever since elementary school I have been told that the Middle Ages were in an historical holding pattern, a time when not much was happening because Europeans had forgotten the wisdom of the Ancient World and had not yet become smart enough to start the Renaissance. This time period was characterized by the Hobbesian life of serfs, the constrained lives of monks and nuns, and knights periodically going on Crusade. This view of history was encapsulated in the phrase "getting medieval". Only when a few Italians managed to check out Aristotle from an Arab library, did they begin to paint masterpieces and discover new continents.
Professor Fried considers this prevailing attitude a terrible slander on the people of the second half of the first millennium and the first half of the second. Instead of seeing the Middle Ages as a swamp which Europeans had to slog through to earn the rewards of the Renaissance on the other side, he sees medieval times as a bridge helpfully allowing Europeans to connect the civilization of the Romans to what we somewhat narcissistically refer to as the Modern World. And if you have the patience to do some slogging of your own through 526 pages of the professor's 50-word sentences (plentifully supplied with semi-colons), he will explain why.
Professor Fried considers this prevailing attitude a terrible slander on the people of the second half of the first millennium and the first half of the second. Instead of seeing the Middle Ages as a swamp which Europeans had to slog through to earn the rewards of the Renaissance on the other side, he sees medieval times as a bridge helpfully allowing Europeans to connect the civilization of the Romans to what we somewhat narcissistically refer to as the Modern World. And if you have the patience to do some slogging of your own through 526 pages of the professor's 50-word sentences (plentifully supplied with semi-colons), he will explain why.
August 17, 2020
Who is this for? I read his book about Charlemagne and found it really good- focused, informative, easy to read. this one? he just kind of goes all over the place with zero focus on discipline, constantly name-drops historical figures without elaborating on their context.
its full of unquestioned ideology too that the reader is just expected to accept at face value- he gets really close several times to just outright saying that the West invented rational thinking. his main thesis is that the dark ages are a myth and the middle ages were a complex time, but basically accepts the premise that the gothic kingdoms never amounted to anything beyond boethius and waiting around for the carolingians.
there's weird little partisan axes to grind as well- the only time Barbarossa is brought up is to heavily disparage him (fair i guess) but iirc the barbarossa bit comes after a massive ramble that jumps from municipalities to jewish enclaves to the kabbalah to peter abelard to the crusades to eleanor of aquitaine and maybe 2 or 3 other topics- in a HUGE and rambling chapter ostensibly about the east-west schism, which I genuinely don't remember if he writes about in any detail. what's the point?
anyways the main issue is just how unfocused it is. i totally get that a book about so massive a subject cannot possibly go into detail about very much- but he will occassionally go into detail! its just about some minor papal argument he thinks is super important but never really explains why other than assuring the reader that it's key to the ascendancy of west europe. any geographical time period summary will just be a list of names, with a totally random break inbetween to flash forward 100 years or 1000 km across the continent to go on some ramble. any discussion about an intellectual thread- and the intellectual thread between the middle ages and the renaissance and the present day is the entire focus of the book- will just be a list of names, with a totally random break inbetween etc etc. It's just so undisciplined. Newcomers to the subject will be disheartened and not really remember anything other than little tidbits. Advanced readers will just be treated to a list of names they're already familiar with and then the author's opinion about their place in the western thought pantheon.
the book does the opposite of rewarding the reader- you'll manage to somehow navigate three paragraphs of dense, clunky exposition...and then he'll just sort of change the subject. dont bother imo.
its full of unquestioned ideology too that the reader is just expected to accept at face value- he gets really close several times to just outright saying that the West invented rational thinking. his main thesis is that the dark ages are a myth and the middle ages were a complex time, but basically accepts the premise that the gothic kingdoms never amounted to anything beyond boethius and waiting around for the carolingians.
there's weird little partisan axes to grind as well- the only time Barbarossa is brought up is to heavily disparage him (fair i guess) but iirc the barbarossa bit comes after a massive ramble that jumps from municipalities to jewish enclaves to the kabbalah to peter abelard to the crusades to eleanor of aquitaine and maybe 2 or 3 other topics- in a HUGE and rambling chapter ostensibly about the east-west schism, which I genuinely don't remember if he writes about in any detail. what's the point?
anyways the main issue is just how unfocused it is. i totally get that a book about so massive a subject cannot possibly go into detail about very much- but he will occassionally go into detail! its just about some minor papal argument he thinks is super important but never really explains why other than assuring the reader that it's key to the ascendancy of west europe. any geographical time period summary will just be a list of names, with a totally random break inbetween to flash forward 100 years or 1000 km across the continent to go on some ramble. any discussion about an intellectual thread- and the intellectual thread between the middle ages and the renaissance and the present day is the entire focus of the book- will just be a list of names, with a totally random break inbetween etc etc. It's just so undisciplined. Newcomers to the subject will be disheartened and not really remember anything other than little tidbits. Advanced readers will just be treated to a list of names they're already familiar with and then the author's opinion about their place in the western thought pantheon.
the book does the opposite of rewarding the reader- you'll manage to somehow navigate three paragraphs of dense, clunky exposition...and then he'll just sort of change the subject. dont bother imo.
April 5, 2015
Upon this review I prostrate myself. I subscribed to the arrogance of the Enlightenment; constrained by the belief that the golden age of rationalism singularly birthed our present civilization. The magisterial Middle Ages by Johannes Fried seeks to educate my heathen kin in this mistaken notion. In particular, its wonderfully full survey of Europe from late antiquity to the early Renaissance relates the role of the Middle Ages in Europe, its nations, sovereignty, jurisprudence, scientific method, and philosophy. It does so in a clear, and I assume well translated, style that follows developments, characters, and ideas, passing back and forth across time in individual chapters, while ultimately covering a thousand years of history. This work has completely changed my perspective on the role of the Middle Ages.
“The Enlightenment thinker Kant and his contemporaries were heirs to the age they denigrated, not its conquerors. They stood on the shoulders of others, yet were unaware of doing so.” (524, Epilogue.)
“The Enlightenment thinker Kant and his contemporaries were heirs to the age they denigrated, not its conquerors. They stood on the shoulders of others, yet were unaware of doing so.” (524, Epilogue.)
January 28, 2018
It is universally accepted today that the Dark Ages are a myth, roughly as believable as the Australian bunyip. In fact, medieval Europe was far more dynamic and far more intelligent than it was once portrayed. Certainly, post-Roman Europe underwent material decline, and it temporarily lost the high culture, and high thought, of Rome. But soon enough it began to rebound and expand, both geographically and mentally. Johannes Fried’s main theme in this book, which covers A.D. 500—1500, is the rebirth of “mental acuity and of methodically controlled thinking” in the West, and the creation thereby of a new thing, from which the modern world is made.
The bridge over which this passage was made was the Church, both in its institutions and its thought. Even so, if one theme characterizes the events in this book, it is the never-ending conflict between the Church and state for supremacy. This paradox is the skeleton of "The Middle Ages"; the flesh is the individuals whom Fried chooses to exemplify both their time and the progress of thought in medieval Europe. It is all very well done, although I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Fried’s "Charlemagne"—maybe that book hung together better because it was narrower in time and focus, or maybe the translation was punchier in that book. And if you know nothing about the Middle Ages, you will be lost if you start here (especially because the focus is on continental Europe, to the near total exclusion of England, reversing the common balance in English-language survey texts). Moreover, at times this book is on the plodding side, and although it’s ultimately a rewarding plod, you’re probably not going to leap from your bed in the morning eager to pick up again at page 523.
Fried’s main focus is not the tired Mediterranean lands, but the Franks and their successors. But the first person he profiles is Boethius, minister to and executed by the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, in Ravenna, in northern Italy. Fried credits Boethius with beginning the European recapture and development of high rational thought, in his transmission of and commentary on Aristotle’s "Organon," by his employing and developing concepts of the logical order behind the world (and incidentally coining the term quadrivium), and through the “internal dialogue” of his more famous "Consolation of Philosophy," written while waiting for the hangman. Then, turning to the Franks, Fried discusses their shadowy origins, and the career of Pope Gregory the Great, around whom the author weaves discussion of the Lombards (critical mostly because of the later anti-Lombard alliance between the papacy and the Franks, who geographically were on the other side of the Lombards from the Pope) and of the rise of Islam, and its defeat at Poitiers, with that battle legitimizing Charles Martel’s authority.
Next comes Charlemagne, where Fried emphasizes his role in developing education, high learning, libraries, reasoning, distinctions between the public and private realms of the king, and the roots of scientific thinking, “extensively promoted by the monarchy and the church.” Fried also notes the role of Charlemagne’s queen(s), “who played a leading role in the administration of the royal estate,” a common arrangement in the West, unthinkable in the East. From here, the book expands its gaze, turning to England, Spain, and the Vikings, though it focuses most of all on a variety of German kings, as well as the increasingly separate French kings. The book travels quite quickly to the tenth century, where Fried’s thesis is that this era “like no other era before or since in European history grappled with logic and dialectics.” Thus, the origin of the Renaissance is here, supported by a line of mostly religious thinkers since Boethius, and receiving its embryonic form at the millennium. They “pointed the way forward to a reason-based future,” not least by their rescuing of and interpretation of ancient manuscripts “held in the archives of Byzantium and by the Arabs”—whom Fried points out did not show “the slightest interest in [those] treasures],” leaving it up to both famous and anonymous figures of the Christian Middle Ages to incorporate that knowledge into their own proto-modern thinking.
Threaded throughout are endless smaller discussions of topics that I find fascinating. We learn about Manegold of Lautenbach, who argued that tyrants could be deposed by the people (not only by the Pope); Marsilius of Padua, who held much the contrary, and denigrated the temporal power of the papacy; and Petrus Johannes Olivi, who claimed that Christ was utterly poor in material goods and that so should the Church and the religious orders be, not even owning goods in common, and who inspired the Fraticelli. We get discussions of papal schisms, and then some more discussions of papal schisms. We get details of the Reconquista, and of pilgrimage routes. We learn a great deal about the growth of nominalism, often blamed by today’s conservatives for many of the philosophical problems of the modern world. Not for Fried, though, endless coverage of battles and dates. Of those we get very few. His focus is on intellectual history, and people rate inclusion in his history primarily for their effects on the European march to a globally unique way of thinking.
These topics bounce back and forth among longer profiles of more individuals and movements: Peter Abelard (and Héloïse); Frederick Barbarossa; Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who was bold one time too many and ended up hacked to death by the Swiss on the battlefield; popes too numerous to count; Waldes of Lyons (founder of the Waldensians, “the sole medieval heresy to have survived right up to the present day”); numerous religious orders; William of Ockham; Meister Eckhart; Petrarch; and much more. Throughout this the theme of growing intellectual capability continues, given new impetus not only by original thought but also by the Crusades and the Mongols, and the subsequent new knowledge of the world, with consequent new “intellectual flexibility and spatial mobility.”
As with "Charlemagne," a constant theme of Fried’s writing is on the universal medieval focus on the Apocalypse, assumed to be imminent and requiring each man and king to look sharp that his soul might not be taken unawares, and that as many people as possible might be saved from the wrath to come. Perhaps he mentions it a little too much, but perhaps not, since this is a window into how people thought, and it shows how differently they thought from us. Not less competently, but with different emphases and premises. Those who favor economic determinism, or class struggle, or other mechanistic explanations for how the mighty act may find this difficult to accept, but within their premises, the actions of medieval men made perfect sense. They were not stupider than us; in fact, they were probably smarter, because they had to be. They just saw the world through different eyes, and with a less complete set of tools.
Fried ends the book with talking about the start of the Renaissance, in the culmination of a millennium of increasingly sophisticated thought, along with innumerable technological advances, from compasses to bronze castings to a rational monetary economy. (This is not a book about technology, which features only in passing. Fried ignores who invented the compass, although a few seconds’ research will reveal that the statement it was invented by the Chinese rests on very slim evidence, but notes that all useful application of the compass was done by Europeans, along with ancillary, but critical, scientific discoveries like magnetic declination.) None of this would have been possible without the groundwork that began at the time of Boethius and was carried through by others over the centuries. Fried offers an excellent Epilogue (which the reader should probably read first), in which he muses in wonder why, since the Enlightenment, educated opinion has denigrated the Middle Ages. “This attitude is a curious phenomenon; no other advanced civilization on Earth has ever dismissed and denigrated a period of its own past so comprehensively, or even wished to airbrush it out of existence entirely through neglect, in the way Europeans have done with the medieval era.” And, “Not least, then, freedom—political and social freedom, and freedom of thought—may be counted as a signal achievement of those much-maligned centuries of the Middle Ages, for they laid the theoretical foundation of such a concept through their recourse to the notion of ‘free will.’ ” This, perhaps, is the key takeaway—the idea that the modern world is the result of the Enlightenment is largely a fiction, in that freedom and many other things claimed by the Enlightenment, from rule of law to the rights of the individual to scientific advancement, actually arose before the Enlightenment, whose main gift was untrammeled freedom, the atomistic effects of which are now destroying the society so painstakingly built by the men and women whom Fried profiles in this book.
The bridge over which this passage was made was the Church, both in its institutions and its thought. Even so, if one theme characterizes the events in this book, it is the never-ending conflict between the Church and state for supremacy. This paradox is the skeleton of "The Middle Ages"; the flesh is the individuals whom Fried chooses to exemplify both their time and the progress of thought in medieval Europe. It is all very well done, although I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Fried’s "Charlemagne"—maybe that book hung together better because it was narrower in time and focus, or maybe the translation was punchier in that book. And if you know nothing about the Middle Ages, you will be lost if you start here (especially because the focus is on continental Europe, to the near total exclusion of England, reversing the common balance in English-language survey texts). Moreover, at times this book is on the plodding side, and although it’s ultimately a rewarding plod, you’re probably not going to leap from your bed in the morning eager to pick up again at page 523.
Fried’s main focus is not the tired Mediterranean lands, but the Franks and their successors. But the first person he profiles is Boethius, minister to and executed by the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, in Ravenna, in northern Italy. Fried credits Boethius with beginning the European recapture and development of high rational thought, in his transmission of and commentary on Aristotle’s "Organon," by his employing and developing concepts of the logical order behind the world (and incidentally coining the term quadrivium), and through the “internal dialogue” of his more famous "Consolation of Philosophy," written while waiting for the hangman. Then, turning to the Franks, Fried discusses their shadowy origins, and the career of Pope Gregory the Great, around whom the author weaves discussion of the Lombards (critical mostly because of the later anti-Lombard alliance between the papacy and the Franks, who geographically were on the other side of the Lombards from the Pope) and of the rise of Islam, and its defeat at Poitiers, with that battle legitimizing Charles Martel’s authority.
Next comes Charlemagne, where Fried emphasizes his role in developing education, high learning, libraries, reasoning, distinctions between the public and private realms of the king, and the roots of scientific thinking, “extensively promoted by the monarchy and the church.” Fried also notes the role of Charlemagne’s queen(s), “who played a leading role in the administration of the royal estate,” a common arrangement in the West, unthinkable in the East. From here, the book expands its gaze, turning to England, Spain, and the Vikings, though it focuses most of all on a variety of German kings, as well as the increasingly separate French kings. The book travels quite quickly to the tenth century, where Fried’s thesis is that this era “like no other era before or since in European history grappled with logic and dialectics.” Thus, the origin of the Renaissance is here, supported by a line of mostly religious thinkers since Boethius, and receiving its embryonic form at the millennium. They “pointed the way forward to a reason-based future,” not least by their rescuing of and interpretation of ancient manuscripts “held in the archives of Byzantium and by the Arabs”—whom Fried points out did not show “the slightest interest in [those] treasures],” leaving it up to both famous and anonymous figures of the Christian Middle Ages to incorporate that knowledge into their own proto-modern thinking.
Threaded throughout are endless smaller discussions of topics that I find fascinating. We learn about Manegold of Lautenbach, who argued that tyrants could be deposed by the people (not only by the Pope); Marsilius of Padua, who held much the contrary, and denigrated the temporal power of the papacy; and Petrus Johannes Olivi, who claimed that Christ was utterly poor in material goods and that so should the Church and the religious orders be, not even owning goods in common, and who inspired the Fraticelli. We get discussions of papal schisms, and then some more discussions of papal schisms. We get details of the Reconquista, and of pilgrimage routes. We learn a great deal about the growth of nominalism, often blamed by today’s conservatives for many of the philosophical problems of the modern world. Not for Fried, though, endless coverage of battles and dates. Of those we get very few. His focus is on intellectual history, and people rate inclusion in his history primarily for their effects on the European march to a globally unique way of thinking.
These topics bounce back and forth among longer profiles of more individuals and movements: Peter Abelard (and Héloïse); Frederick Barbarossa; Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who was bold one time too many and ended up hacked to death by the Swiss on the battlefield; popes too numerous to count; Waldes of Lyons (founder of the Waldensians, “the sole medieval heresy to have survived right up to the present day”); numerous religious orders; William of Ockham; Meister Eckhart; Petrarch; and much more. Throughout this the theme of growing intellectual capability continues, given new impetus not only by original thought but also by the Crusades and the Mongols, and the subsequent new knowledge of the world, with consequent new “intellectual flexibility and spatial mobility.”
As with "Charlemagne," a constant theme of Fried’s writing is on the universal medieval focus on the Apocalypse, assumed to be imminent and requiring each man and king to look sharp that his soul might not be taken unawares, and that as many people as possible might be saved from the wrath to come. Perhaps he mentions it a little too much, but perhaps not, since this is a window into how people thought, and it shows how differently they thought from us. Not less competently, but with different emphases and premises. Those who favor economic determinism, or class struggle, or other mechanistic explanations for how the mighty act may find this difficult to accept, but within their premises, the actions of medieval men made perfect sense. They were not stupider than us; in fact, they were probably smarter, because they had to be. They just saw the world through different eyes, and with a less complete set of tools.
Fried ends the book with talking about the start of the Renaissance, in the culmination of a millennium of increasingly sophisticated thought, along with innumerable technological advances, from compasses to bronze castings to a rational monetary economy. (This is not a book about technology, which features only in passing. Fried ignores who invented the compass, although a few seconds’ research will reveal that the statement it was invented by the Chinese rests on very slim evidence, but notes that all useful application of the compass was done by Europeans, along with ancillary, but critical, scientific discoveries like magnetic declination.) None of this would have been possible without the groundwork that began at the time of Boethius and was carried through by others over the centuries. Fried offers an excellent Epilogue (which the reader should probably read first), in which he muses in wonder why, since the Enlightenment, educated opinion has denigrated the Middle Ages. “This attitude is a curious phenomenon; no other advanced civilization on Earth has ever dismissed and denigrated a period of its own past so comprehensively, or even wished to airbrush it out of existence entirely through neglect, in the way Europeans have done with the medieval era.” And, “Not least, then, freedom—political and social freedom, and freedom of thought—may be counted as a signal achievement of those much-maligned centuries of the Middle Ages, for they laid the theoretical foundation of such a concept through their recourse to the notion of ‘free will.’ ” This, perhaps, is the key takeaway—the idea that the modern world is the result of the Enlightenment is largely a fiction, in that freedom and many other things claimed by the Enlightenment, from rule of law to the rights of the individual to scientific advancement, actually arose before the Enlightenment, whose main gift was untrammeled freedom, the atomistic effects of which are now destroying the society so painstakingly built by the men and women whom Fried profiles in this book.
August 5, 2016
This book was an ordeal. I would have given up on it if I wasn't so stubborn.
The author goes out of their way to emphasize how much they know about the topic at hand with very little concern for the reader actually gaining any sort of useful knowledge. The organization of each section seems to simply follow the whims of the author. While I appreciate that a linear, chronological approach is insufficient and ill-advised, the constant leaping back and forth in time and across the continent from sentence to sentence was the opposite extreme.
There was good info and some interesting themes, it's just a shame that it was so obscured by making this as deliberately difficult to read as humanly possible without actually writing it in Latin. Contrast this with, say, The English and Their History, which I happened to pick up simultaneously, and you can see the stark contrast in style, tone, and intent. The other is a great example of how to still convey deeper concepts and understanding while not assuming that your audience already knows the full details of every man and event mentioned.
This is not a book intended to actually educate the average reader, and only those already possessing an in-depth knowledge of the subject will be able to tolerate the rapid-fire jumping around with nothing but an obscure ruler's name to indicate the new temporal and geographic context.
Some passages did stray to a nearly readable style, somewhere about 1/3 in (while I can normally digest a 1000 page book in a week, this tome took me closer to four months to slowly consume in 5-10 page chunks, about all I could consume in one sitting without going cross-eyed....I cannot remember specific passages or chapters at this point). For that, this was saved from a one star review. If only the ratio of readable to maddeningly obscure were reversed, this would have been a very different book.
The author goes out of their way to emphasize how much they know about the topic at hand with very little concern for the reader actually gaining any sort of useful knowledge. The organization of each section seems to simply follow the whims of the author. While I appreciate that a linear, chronological approach is insufficient and ill-advised, the constant leaping back and forth in time and across the continent from sentence to sentence was the opposite extreme.
There was good info and some interesting themes, it's just a shame that it was so obscured by making this as deliberately difficult to read as humanly possible without actually writing it in Latin. Contrast this with, say, The English and Their History, which I happened to pick up simultaneously, and you can see the stark contrast in style, tone, and intent. The other is a great example of how to still convey deeper concepts and understanding while not assuming that your audience already knows the full details of every man and event mentioned.
This is not a book intended to actually educate the average reader, and only those already possessing an in-depth knowledge of the subject will be able to tolerate the rapid-fire jumping around with nothing but an obscure ruler's name to indicate the new temporal and geographic context.
Some passages did stray to a nearly readable style, somewhere about 1/3 in (while I can normally digest a 1000 page book in a week, this tome took me closer to four months to slowly consume in 5-10 page chunks, about all I could consume in one sitting without going cross-eyed....I cannot remember specific passages or chapters at this point). For that, this was saved from a one star review. If only the ratio of readable to maddeningly obscure were reversed, this would have been a very different book.
April 13, 2015
We of an enlightened, modern age conceive the Middle Ages, at best, as the culture that carried the classical world to us. At worst, it is a dark, ignorant period that humanity simply suffered through as the price of progress.
From politeness, I avoided a lot of air quotes in the above.
Johannes Fried utterly discredits and undermines all of those same arguments in likely the best single volume history of the period I have read. Here he describes an intellectually and culturally vibrant medieval world that, through its own efforts, erected the substructures of western civilization. This is a superb survey about the birth of Europe and its culture. It begins with individuals and ends with states and theories of kingship. Throughout, Fried traces, with poise and command, a wide-ranging history of ideas and their influence and dissemination. And in an epilogue that should be read by all historians, Fried eviscerates the arrogance of the Enlightenment which managed to denigrate the preceding era through its own - ironic - historical ignorance and prejudice. If only Kant had learned a little humility - one of the supreme medieval virtues.
From politeness, I avoided a lot of air quotes in the above.
Johannes Fried utterly discredits and undermines all of those same arguments in likely the best single volume history of the period I have read. Here he describes an intellectually and culturally vibrant medieval world that, through its own efforts, erected the substructures of western civilization. This is a superb survey about the birth of Europe and its culture. It begins with individuals and ends with states and theories of kingship. Throughout, Fried traces, with poise and command, a wide-ranging history of ideas and their influence and dissemination. And in an epilogue that should be read by all historians, Fried eviscerates the arrogance of the Enlightenment which managed to denigrate the preceding era through its own - ironic - historical ignorance and prejudice. If only Kant had learned a little humility - one of the supreme medieval virtues.
September 14, 2015
I'm sure there are some readers who will give this book 5-stars, but I am not one of them. I was looking for a history of the middle ages that centered around the people. This book was a history of thought/ideas. Granted many of those ideas have come down to modern times from the middle ages. Great. But it wasn't what I was interested in. The language is also BBC impeccable and I couldn't help falling asleep each time I read more than a page or two. This is a book by an academic written for other academics. Here is a sample of a portion of a paragraph to show you what I mean:
"The pope's chief concern had long been the Holy Land. Straight after his election, Innocent called for a Crusade. But in spite of intensive attempts at recruiting, the number of knights who rallied to the cause did not meet expectations. In the interim, too many of them had absolved themselves from their vows to go on Crusade by making payments in lieu, though this money was not redeployed to secure the services of mercenaries instead. Yet what the Holy Land urgently needed was troops, not money. In addition, the Crusade taxes that the pope levied on the faithful provoked widespread anger. Walther von der Vogelweid was once more to hand to voice opposition: "Sagt an her Stoc, hat iuch der babest her gesendet, daz ir in richet un uns Tiutschen ermet unde pfendet?... " (from page 246)
He later goes on to translate, but this is what I mean by academic for the academics. If this is your kind of thing, then this book is for you. It wasn't for me.
"The pope's chief concern had long been the Holy Land. Straight after his election, Innocent called for a Crusade. But in spite of intensive attempts at recruiting, the number of knights who rallied to the cause did not meet expectations. In the interim, too many of them had absolved themselves from their vows to go on Crusade by making payments in lieu, though this money was not redeployed to secure the services of mercenaries instead. Yet what the Holy Land urgently needed was troops, not money. In addition, the Crusade taxes that the pope levied on the faithful provoked widespread anger. Walther von der Vogelweid was once more to hand to voice opposition: "Sagt an her Stoc, hat iuch der babest her gesendet, daz ir in richet un uns Tiutschen ermet unde pfendet?... " (from page 246)
He later goes on to translate, but this is what I mean by academic for the academics. If this is your kind of thing, then this book is for you. It wasn't for me.
December 29, 2015
Johannes Fried is a historian who wants more than anything else in the world, for people to realize that the Middle Ages in Europe, were not what they we think of them. They were not "Dark Ages." They were not a time when the world was less enlightened. It was not a time when people stopped thinking about the world around them. It was not a world full of feudal lords and serfs, hoping that they would not be killed by the Black Death.
Instead, Fried portrays Medieval Europe as a lively era, full of great thinkers, great leaders, and many people wiser than we give them credit for. The concept of "The Middle Ages" as a backward time not worthy of study was first proposed during the Renaissance and then further advocated by Immanuel Kant during the Enlightenment. But, Fried argues, none of the events of the Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment, took place in a vacuum. They all sprung up from ideas that germinated during the Middle Ages.
This book was first published in Germany in 2009, but just recently was translated into English. It is not a book for someone wanting to learn about knights in shining armor, but more for people who want to make sense of an era when Europe was in turmoil after the fall of the Roman Empire, the creation of the Holy Roman Empire, and countless political battles over the Papacy. There are a lot of names to keep track of, but Fried manages to make it all come together and make the Middle Ages sound like a time that was far from dark.
Instead, Fried portrays Medieval Europe as a lively era, full of great thinkers, great leaders, and many people wiser than we give them credit for. The concept of "The Middle Ages" as a backward time not worthy of study was first proposed during the Renaissance and then further advocated by Immanuel Kant during the Enlightenment. But, Fried argues, none of the events of the Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment, took place in a vacuum. They all sprung up from ideas that germinated during the Middle Ages.
This book was first published in Germany in 2009, but just recently was translated into English. It is not a book for someone wanting to learn about knights in shining armor, but more for people who want to make sense of an era when Europe was in turmoil after the fall of the Roman Empire, the creation of the Holy Roman Empire, and countless political battles over the Papacy. There are a lot of names to keep track of, but Fried manages to make it all come together and make the Middle Ages sound like a time that was far from dark.
December 5, 2020
In this strange time, I’ve decided to live in the Middle Ages or at least meditate on the Middle Ages which saw its own plague. Johannes Fried has written a tome of more than 500 pages that is dense, complicated and filled with the most human of historic characters and covers extraordinary events in the history of Europe. His opening sentence is “there can be no such thing as a generally binding history, any more than my reality could be your reality, even though both are indisputable forms of reality.” What we call the “dark ages,” Fried contends, was actually a time of new and gigantic leaps in philosophical thought, basic inventions, art and literature, religious movements, science, political organization and reorganizations, urbanization, national identities. Fried’s summary is that the groundwork for intellectual and cultural unity was laid in the Middle Ages by the monks of the 9-10th c., the scholars of the 10-13th c, and religious and secular leaders throughout whose creative, courageous thinking shaped new concepts and revolutionized the world. They, in the “Middle Ages,” formed the springboard to the Renaissance and the so-called Modern Age. It occurs to me that we’re always living in a “middle age” between then and sometime, somewhere in the future within our own unique realities. Unfortunately human historical memory is about one generation, so we’re never able to take the long view backwards, and we’re always blind to the future. Perhaps this is as it should be.
January 1, 2016
This book is a long hard read but it is worth it. If someone wants to read one book to get informed about the Middle Ages, this is a good candidate, although it is not as accessible as I would like. This book is translated by a German original. It could have made good use of a larger budget for editing and translating.
The premise of the book is that the Middle Ages is an odd and largely unfair way to characterize the thousand years covered by the book. Intellectually, the premise is that the name "Middle Ages" is a derivative name attached to this period at a later time (one that had rediscovered the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity) and was intended to demarcate the time between the end of the classical world and the beginning of the modern world. The author argues persuasively (although I needed little convincing) that this demarcation unfair and that the time from 500 to 1500 (or so) was valuable, well worth learning about, and a fundamental precondition of modernity. The Middle Ages were not a dark time and the period has received a "bum rap"
The story then proceeds in a series of really well done focused chapters that concentrate on a particular them and then develop roughly in chronological order. The book seriously brought back memories of classes long ago past on the "Western Intellectual Tradition" or some related theme - with the difference being that I bet this would be a much better class - although studying would be scary. As history, the book is largely intellectual, political/diplomatic, and cultural. Some battle are listed but without going into details or body counts.
The book provides neat overviews of dozens of really important classical works that would be hard to find these days, much less read (for example, Peter Lombard's "Sentences"). If I sought to read even a fraction of these books, I would get to talk to the authors personally before I finished by reading list. Going on the works I have read, Fried is a superb commenter. The politics are very complex - the starting scenario leads to Charlemagne and develops into a history of the Holy Roman Empire. .... Just think of keeping track of the various important popes, important emperors, the relevant French and English dynasties, the evolution of the Spanish state, and then then a bunch of other minor actors. There is a lot going on. The evolving story of the conflict between secular and religious power is well told and highly informative. One is left at the Renaissance and Machiavelli and there is a sense of continuity.
Readers should have access to a map or two and keep track of often repeated names. This is not a book for skimming - but it is a really good book, even if a bit of a slog. To get up the motivation to push through with this, I linked this book with some others on my list - recent volumes on the history of Rome (SPQR) and a life of St. Augustine (Augustine: Conversions to Confessions). This book picks up with Boethius (not far from Augustime) and continues the story from there up through the scholastics and into the early Renaissance.
The premise of the book is that the Middle Ages is an odd and largely unfair way to characterize the thousand years covered by the book. Intellectually, the premise is that the name "Middle Ages" is a derivative name attached to this period at a later time (one that had rediscovered the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity) and was intended to demarcate the time between the end of the classical world and the beginning of the modern world. The author argues persuasively (although I needed little convincing) that this demarcation unfair and that the time from 500 to 1500 (or so) was valuable, well worth learning about, and a fundamental precondition of modernity. The Middle Ages were not a dark time and the period has received a "bum rap"
The story then proceeds in a series of really well done focused chapters that concentrate on a particular them and then develop roughly in chronological order. The book seriously brought back memories of classes long ago past on the "Western Intellectual Tradition" or some related theme - with the difference being that I bet this would be a much better class - although studying would be scary. As history, the book is largely intellectual, political/diplomatic, and cultural. Some battle are listed but without going into details or body counts.
The book provides neat overviews of dozens of really important classical works that would be hard to find these days, much less read (for example, Peter Lombard's "Sentences"). If I sought to read even a fraction of these books, I would get to talk to the authors personally before I finished by reading list. Going on the works I have read, Fried is a superb commenter. The politics are very complex - the starting scenario leads to Charlemagne and develops into a history of the Holy Roman Empire. .... Just think of keeping track of the various important popes, important emperors, the relevant French and English dynasties, the evolution of the Spanish state, and then then a bunch of other minor actors. There is a lot going on. The evolving story of the conflict between secular and religious power is well told and highly informative. One is left at the Renaissance and Machiavelli and there is a sense of continuity.
Readers should have access to a map or two and keep track of often repeated names. This is not a book for skimming - but it is a really good book, even if a bit of a slog. To get up the motivation to push through with this, I linked this book with some others on my list - recent volumes on the history of Rome (SPQR) and a life of St. Augustine (Augustine: Conversions to Confessions). This book picks up with Boethius (not far from Augustime) and continues the story from there up through the scholastics and into the early Renaissance.
November 2, 2016
A first class and comprehensive history of the Middle Ages. The author demonstrates that they were not the "dark ages" but a period of intellectual and cultural development from a low level after the collapse of the Roman Empire and what the author refers to as "only a very sparse educational canon, a thin trickle of knowledge that carried little with it, flowed from Late Antiquity down to the Middle Ages." (p. 5). The book's style is somewhat dense, which may in part be a result of its translation from German. The Epilogue takes on Kant as a representative of idea of "Enlightenment" which was based in good part on the defamation of the Middle Ages.
The book's index is totally inadequate. The book could have done with chronological tables summarizing the major events and rulers.
The book's index is totally inadequate. The book could have done with chronological tables summarizing the major events and rulers.
November 22, 2021
Great place to start on The Middle Ages. So much covered but enjoyable to work through it.
November 8, 2020
‘In the Enlightenment, everyone was in agreement that the Middle Ages was a backward era that exhibited no yearning for enlightenment, no sense of dynamism, and definitely no spirit of rebellion. This attitude is a curious phenomenon; no other advanced civilization on Earth has ever dismissed and denigrated a period of its own past so comprehensively.’ (p.507)
I wish Fried had put this at the start, instead of hiding it away in the Epilogue, because one of the functions of his book The Middle Ages is to act as a comprehensive refutation of the Enlightenment-influenced view of European history. Apparently that view was largely the fault of Immanuel Kant, in his drivelling 1764 work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Drivelling, and hugely influential, with echoes still being felt today. Fried reserves an entire section of the Epilogue for well-reasoned abuse of Kant, ending with the sardonic suggestion that Kant and his fellows were guilty of being in ‘a state of irrational immaturity’ – an unstated (not even understated) joke.
Similar unstated jokes reveal Fried’s purpose. There can be no accident when he writes: ‘the tenth century … may be said to have witnessed the dawn of the Age of Reason’, and twice uses the phrase ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ (11th century) without referencing Habermas. His intention is to systematically refute the Enlightenment position, by providing the evidence that Kant lacked.
I should not like to give the impression, however, that Fried’s book is light-hearted or humorous. Quite the opposite. It’s magisterial, exhaustive (exhausting). It’s a bit like wading through marble. But when you chip away, a masterpiece is revealed. Dense, classic German scholarship; weighty, authoritative, commanding, gaining its developing power through the meticulous accumulation of detail. Hard work; but it needs to be engaged with. It demands the attention of anyone seeking to understand European history.
It is manifestly, in one sense, the book I’d like to have written if I possessed the scholarship. In another way, however, it’s rather odd. While it seems to want to challenge all conventional thinking about periods and labels, it in fact maintains an entirely traditional belief in them. It merely pushes back all the developments, all the revolutions, by several centuries, sometimes by a millennium. Yet it ignores the implication of this. If Fried can assert that the Age of Reason is the tenth century, he invites counter-claims. Indeed his own work offers other periods (in the Middle Ages) which could equally be described as an age of reason. In other words, almost every period could be so labelled, and instead of merely shifting a historical phenomenon, what he really achieves is to call into question such labelling altogether. What emerges most strongly from his exposition is the sense of continual development, of evolution rather than revolution, in every sphere that he covers: monarchy, government, law, society, commerce, religion, technology. Example after example shows ‘new’ developments in every century, often in every decade, and this process can be extended as far back or forwards in time as one wishes. By the end, even the term ‘the Middle Ages’ seems to fade into meaninglessness. There is no such thing. His book merely deals with a succession of centuries, with effectively random starting and ending points. He admits this at the end (p.512): ‘every delimitation of “ages” is quite arbitrary; such ideological constructs reveal the stance of the ideologue who devised them, and do not represent any objective structures of world history.’ So why does he continue to employ such ideological terms himself, which seem to imply exactly the kind of ‘objective structures’ he’s dismissing?
The issue can be neatly encapsulated by a single passage: ‘Communication networks grew ever denser, while the demands to supply the entire population with food and clothing kept increasing, calling for an ever more specialized division of labour and more streamlined organizational forms for production, communication, transport, warehousing, and bringing commodities to market. Spatial and intellectual mobility were sought-after, along with entrepreneurial spirit, inventiveness, and innovative thinking. This growing diversity of needs and interests demanded new templates of social order and a commensurate capacity for abstraction, as indeed was already being practiced in educational establishments at the time.’ Now clearly much of this could apply to almost any century or period that one cares to name, from the Bronze Age to the 21st century. That indicates the continuity of change and development, not saltations. Yet Fried does indeed apply this to a specific century (the 12th).
So while in one sense this is the book I’d like to have written, in another way I disagree with its fundamental stance and believe its content serves to undermine aspects of its own argument. The freight of the book does not quite match the vehicle that contains it. Strange.
I probably need to re-read it, but it’s a daunting proposition.
I wish Fried had put this at the start, instead of hiding it away in the Epilogue, because one of the functions of his book The Middle Ages is to act as a comprehensive refutation of the Enlightenment-influenced view of European history. Apparently that view was largely the fault of Immanuel Kant, in his drivelling 1764 work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Drivelling, and hugely influential, with echoes still being felt today. Fried reserves an entire section of the Epilogue for well-reasoned abuse of Kant, ending with the sardonic suggestion that Kant and his fellows were guilty of being in ‘a state of irrational immaturity’ – an unstated (not even understated) joke.
Similar unstated jokes reveal Fried’s purpose. There can be no accident when he writes: ‘the tenth century … may be said to have witnessed the dawn of the Age of Reason’, and twice uses the phrase ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ (11th century) without referencing Habermas. His intention is to systematically refute the Enlightenment position, by providing the evidence that Kant lacked.
I should not like to give the impression, however, that Fried’s book is light-hearted or humorous. Quite the opposite. It’s magisterial, exhaustive (exhausting). It’s a bit like wading through marble. But when you chip away, a masterpiece is revealed. Dense, classic German scholarship; weighty, authoritative, commanding, gaining its developing power through the meticulous accumulation of detail. Hard work; but it needs to be engaged with. It demands the attention of anyone seeking to understand European history.
It is manifestly, in one sense, the book I’d like to have written if I possessed the scholarship. In another way, however, it’s rather odd. While it seems to want to challenge all conventional thinking about periods and labels, it in fact maintains an entirely traditional belief in them. It merely pushes back all the developments, all the revolutions, by several centuries, sometimes by a millennium. Yet it ignores the implication of this. If Fried can assert that the Age of Reason is the tenth century, he invites counter-claims. Indeed his own work offers other periods (in the Middle Ages) which could equally be described as an age of reason. In other words, almost every period could be so labelled, and instead of merely shifting a historical phenomenon, what he really achieves is to call into question such labelling altogether. What emerges most strongly from his exposition is the sense of continual development, of evolution rather than revolution, in every sphere that he covers: monarchy, government, law, society, commerce, religion, technology. Example after example shows ‘new’ developments in every century, often in every decade, and this process can be extended as far back or forwards in time as one wishes. By the end, even the term ‘the Middle Ages’ seems to fade into meaninglessness. There is no such thing. His book merely deals with a succession of centuries, with effectively random starting and ending points. He admits this at the end (p.512): ‘every delimitation of “ages” is quite arbitrary; such ideological constructs reveal the stance of the ideologue who devised them, and do not represent any objective structures of world history.’ So why does he continue to employ such ideological terms himself, which seem to imply exactly the kind of ‘objective structures’ he’s dismissing?
The issue can be neatly encapsulated by a single passage: ‘Communication networks grew ever denser, while the demands to supply the entire population with food and clothing kept increasing, calling for an ever more specialized division of labour and more streamlined organizational forms for production, communication, transport, warehousing, and bringing commodities to market. Spatial and intellectual mobility were sought-after, along with entrepreneurial spirit, inventiveness, and innovative thinking. This growing diversity of needs and interests demanded new templates of social order and a commensurate capacity for abstraction, as indeed was already being practiced in educational establishments at the time.’ Now clearly much of this could apply to almost any century or period that one cares to name, from the Bronze Age to the 21st century. That indicates the continuity of change and development, not saltations. Yet Fried does indeed apply this to a specific century (the 12th).
So while in one sense this is the book I’d like to have written, in another way I disagree with its fundamental stance and believe its content serves to undermine aspects of its own argument. The freight of the book does not quite match the vehicle that contains it. Strange.
I probably need to re-read it, but it’s a daunting proposition.
June 7, 2025
German medievalist Johannes Fried's 2015 history The Middle Ages is an iconoclastically enlightening rebuttal for the general reader of the belief that the millennium 500-1500 CE was a brutalist, miserable dark age sandwiched between the magnificence of the classical Greek and Roman civilisations and the brilliance of the European Renaissance, when revelatory rediscovery of major philosophical and literary texts from Antiquity led to the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and modernity.
Fried deploys over 600 pages of detailed European medieval history to support his convincing contention that the so called middle period was characterised by a substantial preservation and development of reasoning, starting with the transmission of Aristotelian logic by the late Roman philosopher Boethius, and followed by an impressive variety of intellectual movements led by Charlemagne, Pope Gregory the Great, and multiple German and Frankish dynasties, all of which fostered great libraries, schools, monasteries, and finally the establishment from the 11th century onwards of the great universities.
Political and cultural developments in the period as described by Fried were substantial and globally unique, with church and state vying for power and authority, which led to relatively modern institutions separating church and state, the beginnings of democratic parliaments, and a successful expelling of Islamic inroads into Europe. Strong responses to Mongolian incursions, and the Middle Eastern Crusades following requests from the Byzantium empire for assistance against Arab attacks, broadened the European appreciation of global events, and were the forerunner of the highly influential early modern age of exploration. Fried also outlines a number of technological, scientific, and astronomical discoveries in the High and Late Middle Ages that supported later developments.
Fried concludes this impressive book with a robust attack on the various assessments of Immanuel Kant that the European Middle Ages were childish and grotesque. Some parenthetical comments on relatively inward looking developments in other major cultures, and by implication the absence of political and cultural freedoms that enlivened the success of the West, are instructive.
The Middle Ages is a book that successfully challenges conventional thinking on this most volatile and interesting period in European and global history.
Fried deploys over 600 pages of detailed European medieval history to support his convincing contention that the so called middle period was characterised by a substantial preservation and development of reasoning, starting with the transmission of Aristotelian logic by the late Roman philosopher Boethius, and followed by an impressive variety of intellectual movements led by Charlemagne, Pope Gregory the Great, and multiple German and Frankish dynasties, all of which fostered great libraries, schools, monasteries, and finally the establishment from the 11th century onwards of the great universities.
Political and cultural developments in the period as described by Fried were substantial and globally unique, with church and state vying for power and authority, which led to relatively modern institutions separating church and state, the beginnings of democratic parliaments, and a successful expelling of Islamic inroads into Europe. Strong responses to Mongolian incursions, and the Middle Eastern Crusades following requests from the Byzantium empire for assistance against Arab attacks, broadened the European appreciation of global events, and were the forerunner of the highly influential early modern age of exploration. Fried also outlines a number of technological, scientific, and astronomical discoveries in the High and Late Middle Ages that supported later developments.
Fried concludes this impressive book with a robust attack on the various assessments of Immanuel Kant that the European Middle Ages were childish and grotesque. Some parenthetical comments on relatively inward looking developments in other major cultures, and by implication the absence of political and cultural freedoms that enlivened the success of the West, are instructive.
The Middle Ages is a book that successfully challenges conventional thinking on this most volatile and interesting period in European and global history.
January 10, 2022
Title is slightly misleading. This is NOT a history of the middle ages. Rather, this is about the intellectual history of "the growth of a culture of reason" during the middle ages, (as is stated in the book description).
So while there is, say, a chapter on Papal schisms don't expect to gain a clear understanding of those schisms. Rather, Fried is attempting to show the results of those schisms on intellectual developments. In summary, Fried's argument is that the Dark Ages is something of a misnomer and that the period was actually one of a gradual development of the intellectual arts (reason, logic, dialectics, etc.) that eventually blossomed into the Renaissance & the modern era. Martin Luther, for example, as revolutionary as he was, didn't just come up with his ideas from a blank slate but depended on and was influenced by thinkers who came before him from the middle ages hundreds of years before him.
Author is profoundly knowledgeable but this is not exactly the most readable book. There is definitely some clunky structuring but some of the blame has to go to Peter Lewis' translation, as well as to editing and the g'zillion typos. 3.75 stars.
--------------------
Here's my favorite blooper:
[Pg376] John Henry hoped that his marriage to the Tyrolian heiress - ...then twelve years old to John Henry's eight - had already brought the region under his control. -- Did he really? Because every eight-year-old thinks deeply about statecraft! lol
But also, there are just a lot of nonsensical passages:
[Pg278] as early as 1224, he had founded the Stadium, the university in Naples, and granted it special privileges; henceforth, this institution was to become independent from Bologna, a city that found itself in conflict with the emperor. Huh?? Bologna is in north Italy, Naples is nearly 400 miles away on the SE coast. WTF does a school in one have anything to do with the other??
So while there is, say, a chapter on Papal schisms don't expect to gain a clear understanding of those schisms. Rather, Fried is attempting to show the results of those schisms on intellectual developments. In summary, Fried's argument is that the Dark Ages is something of a misnomer and that the period was actually one of a gradual development of the intellectual arts (reason, logic, dialectics, etc.) that eventually blossomed into the Renaissance & the modern era. Martin Luther, for example, as revolutionary as he was, didn't just come up with his ideas from a blank slate but depended on and was influenced by thinkers who came before him from the middle ages hundreds of years before him.
Author is profoundly knowledgeable but this is not exactly the most readable book. There is definitely some clunky structuring but some of the blame has to go to Peter Lewis' translation, as well as to editing and the g'zillion typos. 3.75 stars.
--------------------
Here's my favorite blooper:
[Pg376] John Henry hoped that his marriage to the Tyrolian heiress - ...then twelve years old to John Henry's eight - had already brought the region under his control. -- Did he really? Because every eight-year-old thinks deeply about statecraft! lol
But also, there are just a lot of nonsensical passages:
[Pg278] as early as 1224, he had founded the Stadium, the university in Naples, and granted it special privileges; henceforth, this institution was to become independent from Bologna, a city that found itself in conflict with the emperor. Huh?? Bologna is in north Italy, Naples is nearly 400 miles away on the SE coast. WTF does a school in one have anything to do with the other??
Read
September 3, 2025Doch nicht so dunkel? Johannes Fried versucht in dieser ausführlichen Darstellung der knapp eintausendjährigen Geschichte des Mittelalters das weit verbreitete Bild eines dunkelen und vernunftlosen Mittelalters zu beseitigen und durch die viel komplexere und dynamischere Geschichte einer sich in stetigem Wandel befindlichen Periode der europäischen Geschichte zu ersetzen die auf die vielfältigen Katastrophen und Errungenschaften dieser Zeit bezug nimmt, zu der die Kreuzzüge und Judenpogrome, die Kriege, die Entwicklungen der Städte als politischer Einheiten, die sich stetig wandelnden Beziehungen von Papsttum und weltlicher Herrschaft, die Entstehung der Theologie, der Juristik, die Scholastik, die Universitäten, der Buchdruck, der Humanismus und die Renaissance, die Astrologie und Astronomie, die Entstehung einer Hochfinanz, die Wiederentdeckung griechischer Philosophie, die frühe Globalisierung und die damit einherrgenden Reformierung bisheriger Kommunikations und Handelsrouten und vieles mehr gehören. Auch die politischen Neuheiten, beispielsweise in England oder Frankreich erfahren Beachtung. Insofern leistet der Autor vorzügliche Aufklärungsarbeit und lässt die Menschen des Mittelalters als das darstehen was sie tatsächlich waren: Menschen. Besonders zu Beginn neigt der Historiker jedoch dazu die aus der Völkerwanderung hervorgehenden Völker zu diffamieren. Ebenfalls anzumerken ist, dass dieses Buch aufgrund der auf beinahe jeder Seite enthaltenen lateinischen Fachausdrücke und Zitate, die zum großen Teil nicht übersetz werden, ein gewisses Vorwissen voraussetzt. Da ich dieses Vorwissen nicht wirklich hatte war ich des Öfteren dazu gezwungen einzelne Begriffe nachzuschlagen.
January 23, 2019
This is a pretty dense read, with rather too much stuff about the secular power of the pope. For a tumultuous millenium, there's too much dry stuff about various legal bases of power. It's also far from introductory, expecting the reader to know at least the basics of what the Holy Roman Empire actually was (as distinct from ancient Rome), etc. But there's enough interesting things here for me to be glad I read it.
September 10, 2025
A good starting point for building "situational awareness" of topics in the Western European Middle Ages to further research. Naturally such a large time period and area cannot be covered in any depth in 600 pages but I was satisfied. My book was stolen from me along with my bag at about page 500 so my review doesn't count the last 100 or so pages.
August 10, 2017
Detailed and fascinating this book covers a long period with information on most of the countries of Europe.
Read
November 13, 2024中世纪是文艺复兴的发明，但种子一直都在
January 6, 2018
This is such a terrible book, it may have cured me from wanting to read anything ever again. I'm not joking. It certainly killed the binge I was on. I read 57 books in 2017, and I was hoping that 2018 might at least rival that. But 5 days and 1 book into the new year, I'm taking at least a month off from reading. That's how sick of it this book made me.
What makes it so exhausting to read is not a mystery, it's the horrifically bad sentences. I seriously think a lot of them might qualify as illegible under some definition. Not that they're ultimately meaningless or incomprehensible, just so poorly structured you have to read them multiple times before you can make sense of them. To see what I mean, check out this beauty:
You may think I cherry-picked an especially bad sentence, but I didn't. Not from the book at least, because I opened it randomly. And honestly, this is no exception. I would estimate that on average you will find at least seven or eight of these basically illegible sentences per page. And this isn't even a particularly bad example either. A lot of sentences are so tricked-out with semicolons, m-dashes, and parentheses you would hardly recognize them as sentences.
How bad the writing really is was comically illustrated to me in the epilogue. There, the author quotes Immanuel Kant at some length. Kant was of course a notoriously bad writer, but reading about a page of his words after 500 pages of this book really felt like I was reading Hemingway or Orwell or some writer like that: the sentences were so clear you could actually comprehend them.
Besides the writing, there are other things that make this book unclear. The priorities of the writer are such that he will drone on and on and on (in illegible sentences) about some canonical law he thinks is really important, but if you blink for one moment you may have missed the founding of the Holy Roman Empire or how the Hundred Years' War started. It's as if the writer both assumes and doesn't assume his audience already knows about the 'important stuff'. He describes these events, but without any excitement and almost in passing, like a teacher would gloss over a subject he is required to but feels you should already be familiar with. (And again, all the time writing in these sentences that would likely qualify as illegible under some definition.) Didactically that just doesn't work, and it's probably the main reason why I feel I haven't really learned anything from reading this book. Even though I should have, as my knowledge of the middle ages was far from extensive.
What also doesn't help is the fact that there are no maps in this book. The author feels no compunction in using historical terms for geographical regions, like Neustria, Pannonia, and Walachia, but what he also doesn't feel is the urge to inform you where they are. So if you don't know already or just aren't fully sure where it was these names referred to, you have to look it for yourself. Even for the empires and kingdoms and duchies mentioned where the location can be safely assumed as known, maps would still be useful to show their extent and historical and geographical contexts. Adding even just a few maps, just the basic ones, would have made this book so much more helpful and pleasurable.
The whole book really feels like a teacher just going trough the motions without any excitement. The only noticeable passion is in the epilogue, where it becomes clear that the author is engaging in a polemic against the idea that the middle ages were 'dark', meaning stupid and barbaric. And he's right, of course, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, and Enlightenment didn't just appear out of nowhere. Thinkers such as Peter Abélard and William of Ockham certainly weren't stupid and barbaric.
But this book is.
What makes it so exhausting to read is not a mystery, it's the horrifically bad sentences. I seriously think a lot of them might qualify as illegible under some definition. Not that they're ultimately meaningless or incomprehensible, just so poorly structured you have to read them multiple times before you can make sense of them. To see what I mean, check out this beauty:
"Later, twenty years after Joan's execution, and six days after the death of his favorite mistress, the wise confidante Agnes Sorel, and when he had long since been hailed as the "Victorious" and had taken Rouen back into French control, King Charles VII once again fell to thinking about his erstwhile savior."The subject of this sentence is King Charles VII, but you wouldn't know that until about forty words into it. For context, this is the first sentence of a paragraph, and the paragraphs preceding it aren't about King Charles. And he doesn't even feature in the paragraph directly preceding it. This means the sentence that is supposed to inform us the topic of conversation has switched from Joan of Arc to King Charles VII, is the above one. So this sentence throws forty words worth of descriptions and modifications at you, but without you knowing to who all this information might apply to. This might sound like some rhetorical snark, but it's not: I truly think the human brain isn't capable to comprehend a sentence like this in one reading.
You may think I cherry-picked an especially bad sentence, but I didn't. Not from the book at least, because I opened it randomly. And honestly, this is no exception. I would estimate that on average you will find at least seven or eight of these basically illegible sentences per page. And this isn't even a particularly bad example either. A lot of sentences are so tricked-out with semicolons, m-dashes, and parentheses you would hardly recognize them as sentences.
How bad the writing really is was comically illustrated to me in the epilogue. There, the author quotes Immanuel Kant at some length. Kant was of course a notoriously bad writer, but reading about a page of his words after 500 pages of this book really felt like I was reading Hemingway or Orwell or some writer like that: the sentences were so clear you could actually comprehend them.
Besides the writing, there are other things that make this book unclear. The priorities of the writer are such that he will drone on and on and on (in illegible sentences) about some canonical law he thinks is really important, but if you blink for one moment you may have missed the founding of the Holy Roman Empire or how the Hundred Years' War started. It's as if the writer both assumes and doesn't assume his audience already knows about the 'important stuff'. He describes these events, but without any excitement and almost in passing, like a teacher would gloss over a subject he is required to but feels you should already be familiar with. (And again, all the time writing in these sentences that would likely qualify as illegible under some definition.) Didactically that just doesn't work, and it's probably the main reason why I feel I haven't really learned anything from reading this book. Even though I should have, as my knowledge of the middle ages was far from extensive.
What also doesn't help is the fact that there are no maps in this book. The author feels no compunction in using historical terms for geographical regions, like Neustria, Pannonia, and Walachia, but what he also doesn't feel is the urge to inform you where they are. So if you don't know already or just aren't fully sure where it was these names referred to, you have to look it for yourself. Even for the empires and kingdoms and duchies mentioned where the location can be safely assumed as known, maps would still be useful to show their extent and historical and geographical contexts. Adding even just a few maps, just the basic ones, would have made this book so much more helpful and pleasurable.
The whole book really feels like a teacher just going trough the motions without any excitement. The only noticeable passion is in the epilogue, where it becomes clear that the author is engaging in a polemic against the idea that the middle ages were 'dark', meaning stupid and barbaric. And he's right, of course, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, and Enlightenment didn't just appear out of nowhere. Thinkers such as Peter Abélard and William of Ockham certainly weren't stupid and barbaric.
But this book is.
April 4, 2015
For me, three stars just means a book is average, middle of the road, not bad but not really good. With that in mind, my three star rating here needs some explanation as The Middle Ages is, in some ways, a very very good book and in others, a very very bad book and thus I end up with “average.”
On the positive side, the content of Fried’s book is fascinating. His thesis is that the Middle Ages were not the dark period without culture, learning, etc as it is often portrayed. (Fried blames this notion largely on Kant.) Fried demonstrates, largely successfully I think, that an age that begins with a Boethius, Gregory the Great, and Charlemagne, ends with Dante, Giotto, and Charles IV and in between gave rise to William of Occam, Abelard, and the great Universities can hardly be seen as a time when art, education, and thinking were nonexistent. Fried’s view of the millennium between 500 and 1500 AD as constant cultural evolution is fascinating, well thought out and compelling.
However, on the negative side the book is seriously flawed, in ways that are probably not for the most part Fried’s fault. The one that clearly is his fault but is one that I could overlook considering the wealth of material being presented is his organization. As others have noted (and as he himself notes in his Preface) that he goes back and forth in time and place bewilderingly. This is a serious problem because it makes keeping the players straight almost impossible in view of the multiple King Charles, Pope Benedicts, etc. that meet throughout the book. It has been suggested that some genealogical charts, time lines etc. would help and I agree. Some maps would similarly be useful and the selected illustrations could use some editing as some don’t seem to go along with he “story” at all while others that you would expect to be there aren’t. The point of all of this is that the book is just plain hard to read, not because it’s concepts are difficult but because of how it is presented.
Going along with this, it appears to me that this is not a good translation from the original German. Now I admit that I don’t read German and certainly didn’t do a comparison but in many places the English is quite stilted and sometimes meaningless. It reads at some points like the translator, Peter Lewis did a literal word for word translation like, say, Google might do, without any consideration of the meaning and in the process, the meaning got lost.
Making these problems even worse is the fact that the editing is so bad as to be shameful. Someone at Belknap should lose their job. Words are misspelled, duplicated, homophones are inserted, phrases and words are repeated. I truly cannot remembering reading a book where the editing has been this poor.
All of this meant that in places, I had to read a sentence or a paragraph several times to understand it, usually only to find that the meaning wasn’t all that complicated. Thus, in the end, I can only recommend this to readers who have a particular interest in cultural history or a deep interest in the history of central Europe (the focus is heavily on the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy).
On the positive side, the content of Fried’s book is fascinating. His thesis is that the Middle Ages were not the dark period without culture, learning, etc as it is often portrayed. (Fried blames this notion largely on Kant.) Fried demonstrates, largely successfully I think, that an age that begins with a Boethius, Gregory the Great, and Charlemagne, ends with Dante, Giotto, and Charles IV and in between gave rise to William of Occam, Abelard, and the great Universities can hardly be seen as a time when art, education, and thinking were nonexistent. Fried’s view of the millennium between 500 and 1500 AD as constant cultural evolution is fascinating, well thought out and compelling.
However, on the negative side the book is seriously flawed, in ways that are probably not for the most part Fried’s fault. The one that clearly is his fault but is one that I could overlook considering the wealth of material being presented is his organization. As others have noted (and as he himself notes in his Preface) that he goes back and forth in time and place bewilderingly. This is a serious problem because it makes keeping the players straight almost impossible in view of the multiple King Charles, Pope Benedicts, etc. that meet throughout the book. It has been suggested that some genealogical charts, time lines etc. would help and I agree. Some maps would similarly be useful and the selected illustrations could use some editing as some don’t seem to go along with he “story” at all while others that you would expect to be there aren’t. The point of all of this is that the book is just plain hard to read, not because it’s concepts are difficult but because of how it is presented.
Going along with this, it appears to me that this is not a good translation from the original German. Now I admit that I don’t read German and certainly didn’t do a comparison but in many places the English is quite stilted and sometimes meaningless. It reads at some points like the translator, Peter Lewis did a literal word for word translation like, say, Google might do, without any consideration of the meaning and in the process, the meaning got lost.
Making these problems even worse is the fact that the editing is so bad as to be shameful. Someone at Belknap should lose their job. Words are misspelled, duplicated, homophones are inserted, phrases and words are repeated. I truly cannot remembering reading a book where the editing has been this poor.
All of this meant that in places, I had to read a sentence or a paragraph several times to understand it, usually only to find that the meaning wasn’t all that complicated. Thus, in the end, I can only recommend this to readers who have a particular interest in cultural history or a deep interest in the history of central Europe (the focus is heavily on the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy).
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April 18, 2016This was a major project. I was impressed by the quality of the translation--consistently excellent--and the thrust of this particular history was to detail the specifically conceptual legacy of the Middle Ages to modern culture, the way in which basic concepts of what a society is, how government should function, and certain fundamental categories of intellectual thought, all of which we now just take for granted, did not actually exist before this period. Fried illustrates how and why they were developed and put into place during this period. Like most of these histories, though, there are extraordinarily long passages dealing with the to-and-fro of important battles, which I never find especially edifying. And given the author's origins, there's a lot of focus on Germany and Middle Europe, not so mcuh on Italy or England, though the detail with which he goes into the specific situation of France's national origins was much appreciated. If you are for a thousand-page long read that will last a year, here's your book.
January 3, 2016
Choice: assumes prior knowledge but has a good thesis in final chapter qeustioning the use the term "Dark Ages."
started October 5th, set aside until winter break.
I picked this up because I lack a real understanding of the origin of the Holy Roman Empire and therfore of Germany. however, is hard to research the history of a place before it existed so I figured a survey of the broad period would help. It did. I feel more confident going forward, though this is by no means a comprehensive look at that subject. it covers way more ground and puts to rest some of those nasty "dark ages" comments made by later writers. The author specifically calls out Kant as the perpetrator...and I'm comfortable blaming Kant.
lots of emphasis on philosophy throughout, takes the narrative up to the early 16th century.
started October 5th, set aside until winter break.
I picked this up because I lack a real understanding of the origin of the Holy Roman Empire and therfore of Germany. however, is hard to research the history of a place before it existed so I figured a survey of the broad period would help. It did. I feel more confident going forward, though this is by no means a comprehensive look at that subject. it covers way more ground and puts to rest some of those nasty "dark ages" comments made by later writers. The author specifically calls out Kant as the perpetrator...and I'm comfortable blaming Kant.
lots of emphasis on philosophy throughout, takes the narrative up to the early 16th century.
January 26, 2015
Those of you who know how fast I read will notice that it has been 8 days since I started this book. I am only 25% in. I just can't make it. I don't know if it's the translation or the original but I find it difficult to stay with it from sentence to sentence. It is made worse by the exceptionally long chapters. When my Kindle tells me that there is an hour and 45 minutes in a chapter, that is one long chapter. Again, I read most books in 2 or 3 days. So I am giving up and starting on a new book which I will hopefully be able to read from start to end without starting to hallucinate from boredom...
June 22, 2015
Ik heb dit in het Duits gelezen en daardoor duurde het wat langer. Een prachtige geschiedenis van de Middeleeuwen. Fried laat duidelijk zien, dat er geen sprake is van de "donkere" middeleeuwen. Aan de hand van de ontwikkelingen in wetenschap, filosofie, religie, staatkunde etc. etc. laat hij zien, dat er ook in die eeuwen heel veel gaande was. De Renaissance en de Verlichting borduurden gewooon door op wat er in de Middeleeuwen in gang was gezet.
Het is geen makkelijk boek, maar wel heel boeiend. Ik vond de manier waarop hij in de epiloog de vloer aanveegt met Kant en nog wat anderen, heel mooi.
(Misschien iets voor jou Susan? Eens wat anders dan de klassieken).
Het is geen makkelijk boek, maar wel heel boeiend. Ik vond de manier waarop hij in de epiloog de vloer aanveegt met Kant en nog wat anderen, heel mooi.
(Misschien iets voor jou Susan? Eens wat anders dan de klassieken).
October 12, 2015
Too much information for this lay reader.
January 25, 2016
Rather a swirl of characters for a newbie. I know I'll appreciate the volume better as I learn more about the era.
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