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Medieval Europe

Chris Wickham

3.66 · Rating details · 866 ratings · 103 reviews

Kavimler Göçü'nün neticesinde Batı Roma İmparatorluğu'nun yıkılmasıyla başlayan Ortaçağ, Avrupa için beraberinde yeni bir etnik, dini ve siyasi yapılanmayı da beraberinde getirmiştir. Siyaset yanında dinin de ağır bastığı/etkili olduğu bu döneme ayrıca Roma'nın mirası, salgınlar, ekonomik krizler ve papalığın dünyevi liderlerle olan mücadeleleri damga vurmuştur.
Avrupa'da K ...more

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Hardcover, 352 pages

Published November 29th 2016 by Yale University Press (first published 2016)

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Jun 02, 2018 Iana rated it liked it

Not a bad book. But I learnt little. The analysis itself is interesting. And it does give an interesting bird's eye view of European developments. At the same time it lacks sufficient detail - so the story feels diluted. And it is also an unnecessarily painful read! Clearer, simpler sentences would have done the job too. ...more

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Mar 05, 2017 Heather rated it liked it

Shelves: dark-ages, post-roman-era-pre-medieval, medieval-history, medieval, history, non-fiction

I have not read a solid overview of the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and this book does an admiral job of providing a survey of the time period, with more detail on what used to be called the "dark ages" than I have come across. That said, it was quite a slog to get through, as much as I am interested in the information. The writing is overly cumbersome at times and hard to digest.

I would love to have him as a professor, though.

My favorite parts where the chap I have not read a solid overview of the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and this book does an admiral job of providing a survey of the time period, with more detail on what used to be called the "dark ages" than I have come across. That said, it was quite a slog to get through, as much as I am interested in the information. The writing is overly cumbersome at times and hard to digest.

I would love to have him as a professor, though.

My favorite parts where the chapters on the early Middle Ages (formerly dark ages), and my favorite chapter was chapter 10 - defining society: gender and community in late medieval Europe. Sounds like a college class I never took.

I also found out I love Iceland.

Here are some random notes/quotes from chapter 10 that I want to remember:

Account on peasant thought worlds. Europe of Middle Ages has a myriad of different peasant societies, each with distinct value systems, which in the future might be, as so far they have not been, properly compared

Icelandic saga narrative - no form of government except regular assemblies.

On medieval Iceland:
The reason for this attention to character was that, in a relatively economically equal society like this one, personal strengths and weaknesses and reputation, could determine success and failure almost totally. This was a non aristocratic society whose self-representation was indeed aspirational, but here the aspiration was only in part focused on honor, for honor in such a society was available to nearly everyone if they had the character and skill to maintain it; p 204-205

But if there ever was a medieval society in which we know a great deal about individual identity it is Iceland, for particular reasons: because in this peasant environment it was individual character which determines success and failure, more completely than almost anywhere else in medieval Europe

Centralized power leads to hostility to out-groups

And the conclusion: the strength of local, cellular, politics, plus the extension of literate practices to ever-wider groups, plus a continuing high-equilibrium economic system, plus a newly intrusive state, made possible by taxation, communications, and once again literacy, helped to create political systems across Europe which allowed engagement, nearly everywhere. This marks the last century of the Middle Ages, not the supposedly late medieval features which mark so many textbooks: crisis, or anxiety, of the Renaissance, or a sense that the continent was, somehow, waiting for the reformation and European global conquest. And it is one of the main elements that the medieval period handed on to future generations.

...more

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Oct 09, 2019 G. Lawrence rated it really liked it

Good book, not the easiest read, tends to wash through complicated issues quickly, but due to the quality of the writing and scholarship it manages not to lose the reader entirely. Still requires intense concentration, however! Interesting subject matter.

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Jun 11, 2019 Xinghe Li rated it it was amazing

A historical masterpiece. It is the best history book I've read in the past few years! If you must read one book about the medieval West, this is the one, period.

First, lector caveat: this book is full of details and microscoped socio-economical analysis. If you just want to get the 'big picture' and ignore how the big picture is constructed and on what basis it is supported, then this is not the book for you. Chris Wickham does not write a popular history reader, but a history book that is set ...more

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Oct 22, 2017 Chris Jaffe rated it liked it

Shelves: history, european-history

So....why didn't I like this book more than I did.

It isn't just that I'm giving it a mere three stars. It's that I really like this author. Seven years ago I read his "Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages" about Europe from 400-1000 and thought it was fantastic. I got a lot out of it. This one? Well, there's good stuff here, but I can't say it made a big difference to me.

Two related issues explain it: 1) I know more than I did then, and 2) this book covers twice as many years in about ...more

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Apr 21, 2019 sage rated it liked it

Shelves: did-i-have-comments, nonfiction, history

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

The overuse of the wo ...more

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Dec 10, 2017 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, audio, 2010s

Covers a thousand years and a huge geographic tapestry in a surprisingly brisk treatment. Bracingly no-nonsense and occasionally contrarian, but Wickham plays fair and lets you know when he's submitting a minority report. A lot of the popular stories of the middle ages, defenestrations and royal eccentricities and the like, are conspicuous by their absence, but Wickham is probably correct in thinking that just because something is famous and well documented doesn't necessarily mean it was all th ...more

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Dec 14, 2017 Ed Greening rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I read for fun, and dreaded picking this up to continue the slog. I felt relieved every time I could get off the bus or metro and stop reading. Somewhere buried deep inside is a good book; thematically it is excellent, and the author has clearly done reams of research. But my God I have never been so bored reading a book before.

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Dec 16, 2019 Colin Baumgartner rated it liked it

I enjoyed this look at what forces were emerging after the fall of Rome. It is fascinating to think that after such an advanced and highly organized empire fell, Europe fell back to such a disorganized existence. I enjoyed how this text walked through the progression of things—starting with the fall of Rome and the lingering Byzantine Empire and then tracing the periods of turmoil and political strife through to the Renaissance.

Sometimes the names of the various monarchs felt a bit dense and unn ...more

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Jan 04, 2021 Denise rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2021

Covering roughly a thousand years of history across the length and breadth of Europe, this book is surprisingly vast in scope for its length. Rather than going country by country, Wickham takes the reader through the years from 500 to 1500 century by century, tracking and comparing social, economic and political changes across the continent. Fascinating and informative.

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Nov 29, 2018 Adam Marischuk rated it liked it

Shelves: medieval-studies, economics, history

"Wickham is the most ambitious and provocative of medieval historians" (Peter Thonemann, TLS)
"Fascinating, judicious, authoritative" (Paul Freedman, Yale)
"Writing with great wit, style and clarity" (John Arnold, Cambridge)
"a model of clarity and accessibility...that remains compelling throughout...engages his reader in his arguments, choices and interpretations and keeps them on their toes" (Mayke de Jong, Utrecht)

These are just some of the raving reviews found on the dust jacket of this incredi "Wickham is the most ambitious and provocative of medieval historians" (Peter Thonemann, TLS)
"Fascinating, judicious, authoritative" (Paul Freedman, Yale)
"Writing with great wit, style and clarity" (John Arnold, Cambridge)
"a model of clarity and accessibility...that remains compelling throughout...engages his reader in his arguments, choices and interpretations and keeps them on their toes" (Mayke de Jong, Utrecht)

These are just some of the raving reviews found on the dust jacket of this incredibly dry book. It sometimes made me wonder if I had actually bought a book with a different dust jacket.

Not that there is anything wrong with the book. It is, to repeat Paul Freedman, 'judicious' in the sense of having careful judgements, as there is nothing groundbreaking, shocking or even mildly exciting. It is the classic case of academic writing being so guarded that conclusions are omitted and neutrality preserved at all costs. This is the Switzerland of history books: "in Italy for 30 years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!" (Graham Greene, The Third Man)

But the book is judicious in another way. It is so focused of government (and nearly all government function in the Middle Ages was judicial, aside from war) that other major trends are only given a rather superficial treatment, especially the Church (and the associated Crusades, Inquisition, Cathars, Mendicants) and the economic scope is limited to "government" function (Kings and aristocrats).

The book begins with the necessary but mundane discussion of what constitutes the Medieval period, and adds nothing earth-shattering which would alter the traditional 500-1500 framework; despite Professor Wickham's continuous reminders that "Europe" in the "Middle Ages" was not uniform, either across geography or chronology.

Then Professor Wickham spends the next ten chapters discussing what amounts to the fact that as taxation grows, so does government. In the early period, fiscal taxation was rarer than payment in kind to the local lord (with the exception of Byzantium and Umayyad Spain). This lack of fiscal prowess by western lords retarded the growth of the government and centralization of power. Which is clearly a bad thing for Wickham despite his 11th hour protest in penultimate chapter "It must be stressed that this is a structural conclusion, not a moral judgement. The view that a rich and autocratic king, who extracts a lot of money from his subjects, is somehow 'better' (even worse, more 'modern') that a king who has to face a powerful aristocracy cannot be justified in any sensible way" (p.233)

Professor Wickham is at his best discussing Eastern Europe, where he allows the narrative to flow. His schoolboy crush on Byzantium does not unfairly alter the chapter on it, but he offers little evidence to support his simultaneous enamourment with Muslim Spain. But the Catholic Church, papal power, monasticism and the rise of the mendicant orders is given short shrift. This could be forgiven if the book wasn't so focused on the rise of central government, which is intricately linked to Vatican bureaucracy, the inquisitorial judicial system and centralism in power deligation. ...more

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Oct 03, 2020 Dennis rated it liked it

It is admirable that the author seeks to grasp a thousand years in such a short book. But he often lists examples rather than picking one, giving it some more detailed attention and then explain its representativeness or particularities. While his focus on states' ability to tax and economic complexity is quite appealing, the realm of ideas ('culture') remains a bit vague. What exactly were the philosophies that underpinned politics? Most times the author reads developments as a result of econom ...more

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Feb 19, 2021 Drew Reilly rated it really liked it

Pretty expansive and very entertaining. I love how Wickham broke down the political, spiritual, and economic developments of Medieval Europe.

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Apr 15, 2018 Brian rated it really liked it

As Chris Wickham states in the introduction, this is an interpretation rather than a comprehensive account of European history between 500 and 1500. Exploring the processes whereby the monolithic structure of the Roman empire transformed into the multifarious polities of Western Europe, he focuses on a series of key moments of change. These he identifies as the fall of the western empire, the eastern empire's confrontation with Islam, the Carolingian experiment, the expansion of the tenth to the As Chris Wickham states in the introduction, this is an interpretation rather than a comprehensive account of European history between 500 and 1500. Exploring the processes whereby the monolithic structure of the Roman empire transformed into the multifarious polities of Western Europe, he focuses on a series of key moments of change. These he identifies as the fall of the western empire, the eastern empire's confrontation with Islam, the Carolingian experiment, the expansion of the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the reconstruction of political and religious power in the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, the eclipse of Byzantium, the Black Death, the development of state structures in the fourteenth century and the emergence of wider popular engagement with the public sphere in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Wickham is a subtle thinker but, as a writer he is no great stylist e.g.

"The Bulgarian khaganate which had stabilised itself inside imperial borders in the late seventh century, when it faced more effective aggression from Constantinople in the mid-ninth century than it had before, recognised the need to adopt Byzantine styles of ruling to survive, and accepted Christianity in 865, much as the Poles did a century later, as we have seen."

For a lay-reader, the text can be hard going at times and the narrative is not always easy to follow; but that's as much to do with Wickham's determination to avoid a teleological approach as it is to with his style. He is very clear that the Middle Ages was not heading inevitably towards the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or modernity. Nor, on the other hand, was it simply a swirling pattern of events. There were processes of disintegration, transformation and reconstruction at work here. There were cultural and economic currents that sometimes assisted and sometimes impeded the transformation. Wickham refuses to ignore those elements of the period that run counter to the overall movement of events, seeking to incorporate them instead into a more complex picture

Personally, I found it interesting to observe the impact of the movement away from a universal system of taxation as it had been conducted in the Roman empire, towards a series of much less powerful polities built around revenues derived from the personal land ownership of an individual monarch, and the eventual return to taxation, driven largely by the need to finance warfare. But this is merely to pick out one small element from Wickham's narrative. There are many other equally fascinating threads running through it, such as the conflict between ecclesiastical and secular power, or the changing roles of serfs, peasants, women and dissenters.

Indeed, there is much more in this book than can be gleaned from a preliminary reading. Authoritative and nuanced Wickham's survey views the Middle Ages as neither the end of antiquity nor the beginning of the early modern era but as a period in its own right with its own defining characteristics. ...more

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Oct 26, 2020 Michael Bellesiles rated it really liked it

This book is an outstanding one-volume history of the millennium from 500 to 1500. Chris Wickham focuses on the structure of these years, the ways in which society was organized, the experience of the different classes, and the wide diversity of human experience over such an extensive period. Wickham does not limit his story to western Europe, as do so many medieval histories, but takes the reader on a tour of each region. Nor does he treat these thousand years as an undifferentiated cultural mo This book is an outstanding one-volume history of the millennium from 500 to 1500. Chris Wickham focuses on the structure of these years, the ways in which society was organized, the experience of the different classes, and the wide diversity of human experience over such an extensive period. Wickham does not limit his story to western Europe, as do so many medieval histories, but takes the reader on a tour of each region. Nor does he treat these thousand years as an undifferentiated cultural monolith. Just as the experience of a merchant differs from that of a serf or peasant, so will life in 9th-century Britain have little connection with 14th-century Scandinavia. The reader thus gets a real sense of what it was like to live in Europe’s many regions through these thousand years.
Wickham makes a number of original observations which challenge the prevailing scholarly consensus. For instance, he notes that the practical reason so many rulers turned to Christianity during the period 500 to 1000: the very organization of the Christian church made it attractive to local elites seeking to consolidate their rule and connect with other parts of Europe. It was not so much that paganism proved worthless or that Christian theology put forth some particularly appealing paradigm, but more that the centralizing impulses of the Church aided secular rulers.
This beautifully illustrated book does not get bogged down in trivia, instead exploring the major developments and conflicts within the context of their own time. Especially impressive is Wickham’s refusal to frame the medieval period teleologically. Most of the books I read in college traced the Middle Ages leading up to the Renaissance, as though no other historical path was possible. This work strikes me as truer to the way history works, understanding the events as flowing from the past rather than toward a predetermined future. Escape from our current Dark Age into a fascinating millennium that provides a valuable reminder of the compelling sweep of history.
...more

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Jan 29, 2018 alex guns rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This may be the last example I need that there is no such thing as a solid, brief overview of Medieval Europe. There are two aspects of this book that I admire Wickham for including, both of which deflate many well-worn tropes of Medieval historiography.

Byzantium greeted the opening of the Medieval millennium (500 AD) at its apogee of power and prestige. 200 years late the Umayyads would conquer nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula creating Al-Andalus, the largest cultural center on the European ...more

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Dec 17, 2017 Justina rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

Any work that seeks to wrap up a millennium of history across Europe would understandably face the same challenge - the tension between generalization and specificity, which is evident throughout the book. To Wickham's credit, he tenaciously and conspicuously battles the temptation to generalize, by often summarizing the histories of various European polities in different periods, and by emphasizing the differences among them. At the same time, in each chapter, he still manages to lay out the st ...more

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Mar 26, 2018 Ross rated it liked it

This is the best book I have read yet on the Medieval Period. About half the book is the typical period history giving the reader the names and dates of hundreds of rulers and the wars that they fought. I have zero interest in these names and wars.
The other half of this book is about the culture and economy of the period from the year 500 to the year 1500, which is what I am interested in.
The big story here is that from 500 to 800 there is little growth and little is known, but in the next 300 y ...more

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Mar 04, 2018 Mary Catherine Pace rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: History students, some background helpful

Well-organized study of Medieval Europe from an historian who is not a sexy modern-narrative-type historian. Wickham's scholarship is sound and no-nonsense, as befits a system-centered Marxist-trained historian, blessedly free of massive quaint anecdotal asides to distract the reader from the chronology and major conflicts and developments of the periods addressed in this concise history. His organizational and presentation skills are amazing, and he covers all of European Medieval history in a ...more

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Sep 30, 2017 Filip rated it liked it

Flawed history book. The broad scope, both in time and space, belies the author's actual focus on Britain (where he is highly knowledgeable). The Italian cities and the Low Countries are cited frequently as an economic powerhouse, but that doesn't translate in any specific focus on that area. A pro-Brexit spirit seems to pervade, with statements against European unions of any kind sprinkled throughout the book. The general thesis, as spelled out in the book's conclusion, is rather too vague to b ...more

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Dec 18, 2017 Tariq Mustafa rated it it was amazing

Medieval Europe has so influenced so much of our current world that it must be explored in depth. This book is not a straight chronological simple history of what happened before and what happened after it. Rather, the author has focused on the reasons and factors of European reformation from the ashes of the Roman empires.

The author's flow of writing is surprisingly riveting for a subject like Medieval European history. Subsequent reading of other books around the European history and historic ...more

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Apr 24, 2017 Kadri rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A nice overview of the Middle Ages in Europe. I love having various history lessons of my youth expanded in this manner. (Or learning the English names for them.) I went with the audiobook and even though it forces you to concentrate more than the usual bunch, it is well narrated and worth the time.

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Mar 09, 2018 John rated it did not like it · review of another edition

A textbook on how to suck all the life and juice out of a rich and fascinating topic. Maybe it's just that the reader sounds like he's having a hard time staying awake--but more likely it's the author's focus on large social trends and economic generalities that left me totally not caring that my loan period (borrowed it from the library) ran out before reaching the end. ...more

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Apr 13, 2017 Brett rated it liked it

Short, but hard to finish. There isn't much detail, unsurprisingly for a 258 page book covering a thousand years of history, but generalities about political change from the Byzantine Empire to Scotland aren't really engaging. ...more

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Sep 09, 2020 AS rated it it was ok

Shelves: history

Read this because of glowing reviews in either/both of the TLS and LRB. Falling somewhere on the more hardcore fringe of popular history, this is a book that is about a view of the history of this period as much as it is about the period. I suppose there maybe claims or arguments in here that come across as provocative or brilliant or outrageous to actual historians, but for the layperson the overarching themes don’t impress.

The book manages to be both dense and sprawling, covering so many aspe Read this because of glowing reviews in either/both of the TLS and LRB. Falling somewhere on the more hardcore fringe of popular history, this is a book that is about a view of the history of this period as much as it is about the period. I suppose there maybe claims or arguments in here that come across as provocative or brilliant or outrageous to actual historians, but for the layperson the overarching themes don’t impress.

The book manages to be both dense and sprawling, covering so many aspects of the history of a vast area over a thousand years. Without the masterful writing of a Norwich, the “arguments” of the book are at times hard to follow and at other times not very interesting. He includes some content on Byzantium, but despite his protestations that the history of this bit of the old Empire is critical to understanding the rest of Europe, it always seems like a very remote sidelight to the stories of Western Europe.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a whole lot that is fascinating in here, I suppose that I’m mainly cross because I’m left with way more questions than I started with. Some of the big open issues:

He talks about the Roman idea of a “royal public sphere”, which persists throughout medieval times and morphs into the parliaments we now know, but never explains what this “public sphere” looked like, either in its Roman or Carolingian form. Similarly, the “politics of land” is central to Roman and early medieval states, but he never explains what it really means. He makes a lot of the “cellular structure” of states/politics, which really seems like a fancy description of what you’d get when large systems breakdown in to smaller isolated ones.

“Tax raising system” is a phrase that is central to his understanding of the operation of the state and the evolution of the state in this period. But he never explains how any of these systems or processes worked, leaning instead on vague statements like “fiscal patterns”. It seems really key to understand how money or goods were collected and from who - were these “systems” always simply a kind of expropriation by elites who had a monopoly on violence, or were they a willingly granted by a wider population for some “greater good”? Or did that change at some point?

In his conclusion, he highlights the Christianisation of Europe, which, he says, “brought the structures of the Church with it”. This seems importantly wrong, and at odds with his more detailed discussion of the early and middle period. It seems as though the “structure” of the church was something that developed well after the spread of the actual mythology and its adoption by elites. He hints at “structure” evolving out of shared political interests at first, then perhaps in opposition to temporal powers (Gregory etc). Again, this is an area left badly underdeveloped: how did the monasteries spread and how relevant was this? Why did temporal powers let a pope in Rome become a prince of international reach?

He insists many times that “writing did not change the way people think”. This sounds like he’s kicking against some orality-literacy discourse. Apart from being annoying, these comments also seem to run against the course of all the history he’s telling. Maybe the act of writing didn’t change anyone’s thoughts as if with a magic wand, but he details over many pages how writing led to massively improved communication over long distances, which allowed the Church to build structure, it allowed the development of laws and administration that became the modern State, and ultimately provided space for public intellectual debate that hadn’t previously existed. Presumably that changed the way people think?

Finally, in the late medieval period, he describes the development of states with much greater fiscal demands to support standing armies. This state power came into conflict with a peasantry with much greater bargaining power after the decimation of the Black Death. This conflict turns into more public forms of state authority and both the ideas and the practices of government by consent of the governed. All that’s great, but I’d love to know WHY there was this big push for expansion and aggression that led to the need for large standing / mercenary armies with all the associated costs. Seems like a big gap in the story.

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Mar 20, 2021 George rated it it was ok

This book by Chirs Wickham is a serviceable introduction to the medieval period. I struggled with this book, because there were occasional flashes of brilliance where I thought he did a tremendous job describing the historical feelings of the people, and then he would say something that I just found to be off-base or poorly explained. I suppose I am a hard sell because the medieval period is my favorite period in history so I'm not the general audience that this was intended for. Wickham is smar This book by Chirs Wickham is a serviceable introduction to the medieval period. I struggled with this book, because there were occasional flashes of brilliance where I thought he did a tremendous job describing the historical feelings of the people, and then he would say something that I just found to be off-base or poorly explained. I suppose I am a hard sell because the medieval period is my favorite period in history so I'm not the general audience that this was intended for. Wickham is smart man and I'm sure in his more narrow works his nuance comes through more, but in a book on a topic this broad I feel as though it failed to grasp the really important things that help to separate medieval people from us.

I really liked the first chapter of this book, quite a lot really. It reminded me of the first chapter of Zoé Oldenbourg's crusades book. I actually think this one is a bit better in some respects as it is closer to our own time and is more approachable for the general reader. It does a great job at debunking some common myths about the medieval era while also presenting a good overview of the medieval mindset and thinking. George RR Martin would have done well to read it...

I think what ultimately gets in the way of Wickham is just that he bit off more than he could chew. The middle ages is a period that is a thousand years in length. That is a tremendous amount of historical time to cover with many minute changes taking place all of the time. This is what ultimately kept me from enjoying it, because the extrapolations he was making just didn't fit what i knew of the period. I think he and I could have a good conversation about them and probably reach the same conclusion, but I think this could mislead readers.

All of that said and despite my two stars this is really the only book of its type for a general overview of the whole middle ages. So if you have never read anything on the medieval period before and you are interested this would be a good place to start until something better comes along. ...more

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Jul 19, 2017 Ada rated it liked it

I suppose I came to Chris Wickham’s Medieval Europe with the wrong expectations. It's tempting to see history as the deeds of men and women, related by chroniclers. I do not mean necessarily the deeds of kings and queens, but those of knights, townsmen or common peasants. In the writing of Chris Wickham, all these individuals are merely units to be aggregated to envisage the the economic and the sociological trends of the age.

This makes for rather dry reading – even if the subject is ambitious a ...more

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Dec 11, 2020 Carlton rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

A necessarily engaging and demanding overview of trends in European medieval history from about 500-1500, complemented by a useful set of maps at various points in time, and some relevant photos of buildings and artworks.
As Wickham says : “my intention is to concentrate on the moments of change and the overarching structures, to show what, in my view, most characterised the medieval period and makes it interesting”.
I read this in concentrated bursts, as it is fairly dense, and for me needs to be ...more

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Feb 04, 2021 Alan rated it liked it · review of another edition

I enjoyed this a good bit. I wanted a survey of the Medieval period and it’s exactly what I got. However, I do think that the first part of the book—with its insights into the transition from Rome to the proto-feudal kingdoms that formed out of the different tribal peoples—was the most interesting part. I believe that is also the author’s area of expertise, which isn’t surprising in hindsight. The first half seemed to have many more insights born of someone who really understands the complexitie ...more

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Aug 11, 2019 Jürg rated it it was amazing

A very good, concise and readable overview over the European Middle Ages - unusually for an English-language treatment of the period, it does not confine itself to William the Conqueror, the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War, and the War of the Roses, but includes the rest of Europe, including small or temporarily important players, as well as Europe's neighbours. Wickham does not confine himself to a political or military history, but delves into the economic and fiscal organisation of the diffe ...more

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About Chris Wickham

Chris Wickham

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"Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History, and Faculty Board Chair 2009-12.

I have been at Oxford since 2005. Previously, I was Lecturer (1977), Senior Lecturer (1987), Reader (1988), and from 1995 Professor of Early Medieval History, University of Birmingham; and I was an undergraduate and postgraduate at Keble College, Oxford, from 1968 to 1975.

I am a Fellow of the British Academy, ...more

Books by Chris Wickham

The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800

Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400-1000

Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century

Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century

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News & Interviews

33 Sweeping Multigenerational Family Dramas

Why not focus on some serious family drama? Not yours, of course, but a fictional family whose story you can follow through the generations of...

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Quotes from Medieval Europe

“There is a common medieval literary trope, and some actual cases, of enemies being invited to a meal to make peace, and then being killed while eating and drinking; it may have been a sensible strategy, for people’s guards were down, but it was very dishonourable indeed.” — 1 likes

“Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.” — 0 likes

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Preview — Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham

Medieval Europe

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About Chris Wickham

Books by Chris Wickham

News & Interviews

Trivia About Medieval Europe

Quotes from Medieval Europe

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Discuss This Book