The Rise of Christian Europe

by Hugh Trevor-Roper

From the blurb: The rise of Western Europe in the Middle Ages is a fascinating historical process. In this absorbing study the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University singles out the crucial stages in the chain of events whereby the European relics of the Roman Empire were re-animated to become the heart of the modern world.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Medieval

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Philipps Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable ... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them ... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."
Trevor-Roper's most commercially successful book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.
Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.

Reviews

[Walter · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is less a historical treatise and more of a series of lectures that Trevor-Roper gave to the BBC back in the early 1960s. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a British historian who was famous for writing a book on the last days of Hitler. The famous English historian Arnold Toynbee once famously chided Trevor-Roper with being excessively sarcastic and flippant in his writings. The great English writer Evelyn Waugh once criticized Trevor-Roper for his anti-Catholic bias. Unfortunately, both of these vices are eminently present in "The Rise of Christian Europe."

Overall I was very disappointed with this book. While the author brings up some interesting points, his bias is so obvious that I felt like I was reading a work of propaganda, not a work of scholarship. Trevor-Roper does not reference any of the outstanding works of Medieval History that had been published up until that point in the 20th Century. Instead he quotes two authorities, Sir Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, both of whom lived in the 18th century and neither of them known for being experts in medieval history. The only other source that he quotes is the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, a source that is notable not only because he lived within 100 years of the publication of this work, but because he is not a prominent anti-Catholic.

In his chapter on the Crusades, the author seems to think that St. Dominic was a reformed Albigensian and that St. Francis of Assisi was a rehabilitated Waldense. He said that bishops like St. Augustine of Hippo were equal in status to the Pope. Is that true? If you read the letters of St. Augustine it is obvious that St. Augustine did not think so. In his chapter on the 12th Century renaissance the author says that the Pope hated the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick I because Fredrick insisted on founding educational institutions. Which is interesting because the Church during this same period founded universities such as Oxford, the Sorbonne and the Jagiellonian University in Poland. As you can tell, the author is a little challenged when it comes to the history of the Middle Ages. It is always a shame when a historian writes a work about a people or nation for which the author has nothing but contempt.

Despite all of the flaws that I outlined above, the author has some interesting things to say, especially about the continuation of Roman trade and emigration patterns during the sixth and seventh centuries and the role of the rise of Islam and the Viking raids on the rise of feudalism. His prose is interesting and very readable. Despite this, I would not recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the history of Europe during the Middle Ages.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting short little book in which the author does not apologize, but instead defends his Eurocentric views on history. The book actually ends before European predominance and seems to be more about why it became predominant in the first place. He acknowledges that Europe no longer holds this position on the world stage, but seems to think it’s possible for it to arise again.

[John Mannion · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat dated in its attitudes but a vigorously argued romp through around 900 years of European history.

[Morgan Goodwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Valuable for the attempt to distill down a theory of why Europe became so powerful emerging from the Middle Ages. Unabashedly euro-centric and at times hopeless racist, I still found it interesting to fill in big gaps in my understanding of the Catholic Church, the Byzantine empire, the monks, the crusades and feudalism, and getting a sense of how these events all fit into a narrative.

[Derek Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trevor-Roper has some good lines, but I fear he's bitten off more than he can chew here. He's also prone to historico-philosophical pronouncements that are just confusing and annoying. Nice illustrations.

[Sestius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as chauvinistic as its title suggests, this is a whistle-stop tour of the European Middle Ages which attempts to explain why, seemingly against the odds, Europe wound up dominating most of the Modern Ages (so far). It's not exactly a must-read book, but Trevor-Roper's prose can be quite entertaining now and then, and it's fun to read something synoptic. A few of the ideas in The Rise of Christian Europe, like the image of the early Benedictine monastery as a self-replicating, civilisation-preserving cell, are quite interesting in themselves. Other than that, there's not much to see here.