David M. Perry's and Matthew Gabriele's THE BRIGHT AGES: A NEW HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

"It's always the historian's job to say 'it's more complicated than that.'

Lots of pixels are already being spilled on behalf of and about this book by people better acquainted with its subject matter than I, so I'm just going to focus on the sheer enjoyment and the new thoughts that The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe gave me during my brief turn with our public library's copy -- brief not only because I was enjoying it and so tore through it with my usual voraciousness, but also because I knew a lot of other people were waiting for it (shakes fist at Libby app). I hope it gets very widely read after I'm done. 

Like Dan Carlin likes to say, I'm a fan of history rather than a student of it, and I'm such a wretched fan that I didn't know that my previous favorite history book about the period covered by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele was not in favor until I looked at some reviews of it prior to writing this post. I don't even recall how I got my hands on William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, but once I did, I didn't let it go for years.* I read it so many times that lines or sometimes whole passages from it intruded on my thoughts when I was reading historical fiction. William Manchester lived rent-free in my head as I first read the great Dorothy Dunnett, for instance.

I think he was maybe squatting a bit in Perry's and Gabriele's heads, too, though; I didn't think of his book at all while reading this until a sly little reference to its title showed up in The Bright Ages. It comes about halfway through, in the midst of a discussion of gothic church architecture and how its system of buttresses and other tricks allowed for walls composed as much of beautiful stained glass as of stone:

In a world made of wood, stone impressed; but for a world before electricity, more important was light. This wasn't a world lit only by fire, but more important, one illuminated by the sun. Allowing that sunlight inside, allowing an interior to gleam, was to capture something of the divine. So heavy stone walls were replaced by translucent and radiant colored glass.**

Underlining mine; italics theirs.

Really, that passage is a thesis statement for this whole book. The period between the canonical Fall of the Roman Empire (but Philip K. Dick taught me that The Empire Never Ended...) and the start of the Renaissance is still most commonly described by the loaded phrase "The Dark Ages" but culturally, intellectually, politically, materially, that period of time was no darker than our own in a lot of key respects. In the literal terms the quoted passage begs us to consider, for example, the sun shone for the same number of hours per day as it does now (and through much cleaner air); it was only at nighttime or deep indoors in windowless rooms that the visible world shrank down to what could be lit by a flame.

And if one zooms back camera (and yes, I'm totally thinking of Alejandro Jodorowsky's last line in The Holy Mountain, here) and takes in all of the then-known world, civilization and all of the ideas and traits we associate with it wasn't suddenly extinguished when Alaric sacked the city of Rome; rather, like a balloon a bunch of kids take turns batting around a room to keep it from touching the carpet, its light was passed from place to place via trade and the travels of scholars and pilgrims and on the backs of war horses and yes, even in the minds of "ignorant" tribesman types gawking at the aqueducts and roads left behind by the classical Roman empire.

And the idea of Rome didn't die, either; people like Galla Placidia, daughter of one Roman Emperor, wife of another (and before that of a Visigothic king) and mother to yet another, never thought of herself as anything but Roman even though she had witnessed the famous sack and led a tumultuous existence that could make anyone agree with Gandhi that Western Civilization was something they should maybe try sometime. Following her the rulers of the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans and still had chariot races (boy did they have chariot races) and adopted laws and customs from the classical empire even as they embraced this newfangled Christianity. And the idea persisted in some ways even until the Hapsburgs presided over something that by axiom was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, except they themselves might have disputed it when they weren't busy keeping their subject kingdoms from trying to destroy each other and engendering cultural conflicts that are still affecting us even in this stupid 21st century that convinces me more every day that a whole lot of people who desperately cling to the idea that the Dark Ages were totally a thing because it props up their dumb culture war talking points also seem to think that it would be great if we could Make the Age Dark Again.

Oh no, Kate's getting political again, but Perry and Gabriele went there before I did; their whole point in writing this book is to debunk and deconstruct the hundreds of years of post-Renaissance bad history and to point out how that bad history has been used to justify everything from the 17th-19th century return to slavery as a justifiable institution despite being pretty un-Christian, to the 21st century talking head hobby of blathering about "clashes of civilizations" to justify Antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism and, of course, racism. History is written by the victors, sure, but the losers had a habit of finding ways to record their existences and leave traces for us to read as well, and we ignore those traces to our cost.

And this is where the duo really shines. For the most part, they're using the same sources as Edward Gibbons and his heirs always have, but look at them with an eye to why people like Procopius wrote what he did, rather than just taking what he did write as face value, ignoring the fact that his public and private writings frequently contradicted each other, and picking out the bits that agree with a predetermined thesis. Look at the circumstances under which the man worked and what he said and why he said it can make more sense, especially if its backed up by archeological evidence or other primary sources or just the lived experience of standing in the Hagia Sophia even after centuries of alterations... to say nothing of the fruits of hundreds of years of scientific research that has yielded all kinds of insights into the daily realities of The Little People.

The two really do zoom back, by the way, to take in, as I said, the entire known world, including the rise of Islam and the importance of its scholars to what would come to be Europe's Renaissance but also their presence as ordinary residents of the Iberian peninsula where they lived alongside Christians of many kinds (one thing I like is the emphasis in this book on the fact that right from the start there were always many Christianities, plural) and Jews, and the odd pagan hangover in varying degrees of peaceful coexistence -- though Perry and Gabriele are very careful not to fall into the trap of romanticizing this coexistence as This is the Past That Liberals Want.

The Mongols, too, get a turn in the spotlight as carriers of goods and ideas (and, most likely, according to modern archeological and genetic research, probably the Black Death) back and forth, just as the Vikings did. Remember that, famously, one in 200 men now living have some of Genghis Khan's DNA, and not all of them are in Asia.

Hard to share chromosomes without sharing a few other things.

The book ends with a return to Ravenna a thousand years after Galla Placidia built her mausoleum with its marvelous interior sky of lapis lazuli and gold-infused glass tesserae, to consider Dante Aligheri, exiled from Florence by political strife and writing The Divine Comedy's quest for divinity, imagined as light -- and then considers Petrarch, the first great populizer of the idea that the thousand or so years that preceded his personal awesomeness had been universally ignorant, violent and dark (or, as a later scholar would describe the whole of human existence, nasty, brutish and short!), inviting us first to ponder why he found it necessary so to characterize the times that spawned him, and whose interests it has served later historians to perpetuate and intensify Petrarch's errors. As the authors conclude near the end of The Bright Ages, they were "not simple or clean, but messy and human, and that's as close as we can come to the truth."

I hope someday the same kindness is employed in talking about us. 

Now excuse me; this would be a very interesting time to finally read The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, which I've owned for 20+ years but never finished. 

*And while I absolutely see how Manchester's book merits criticism for perpetuating stereotypes about the period he covers, that book us how I first learned to see Henry VIII as more than a wife devouring monster (listen to the music he composed sometime!), to appreciate Magellan, and to empathize with Lucrezia Borgia. So I'll not abandon it wholly. 

**And of course, any discussion of French cathedrals and the like always brings me around to my beloved Orson Welles and my single favorite few minutes of cinema yet created, this bit from his wonderful F for Fake in which he is moved to unparalleled eloquence as he contemplates Chartres:

 

 Go on singing.

And speaking of singing, if you're a bi-sensuous reader like I am, who likes to listen to relevant music while reading a particular book, I bring you a few selections for your listening enjoyment. The first is some of the Byzantine Secular Classical music brought to us through time by composer and musicologist Christodoulos Halaris. I first found this stuff at a used record store in Central Square, Cambridge, MA when I was living in the area in the 90s and I still love it.

 

And here's some music composed by the six-wived Henry VIII that is good enough to make me sometimes feel like forgiving him a tiny bit for some of his bullshit:

 

People are complicated, and always have been!