The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

by Matthew Gabriele, David M. Perry

"The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come….The Bright Ages is a rare thing—a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading.”—Slate

"Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating." —The Boston Globe

A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality—a brilliant reflection of humanity itself.

The word “medieval” conjures images of the “Dark Ages”—centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors. 

The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante—inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy—writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today.  

The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world “lit only by fire” but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics.  

The Bright Ages contains an 8-page color insert.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Medieval History, Audiobook, European History, Historical

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 7, 2021

About the author

Matthew Gabriele is a Professor of Medieval Studies and Chair of the Dept. of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech.

His research and teaching focus on religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse (in various combinations), whether manifested in the Middle Ages or modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and medieval religious and political life more generally. He also has presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena like Game of Thrones or video games.

He has published several books and numerous articles. He also has presented at dozens of national and international conferences and has given talks at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Virginia, the University of Minnesota, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the University of Kent, and Nottingham Trent University. In 2010, he was a visiting researcher at Westfälische Wilhelms Üniversität-Münster, and from 2016-19 he was an elected Councilor of the Medieval Academy of America.

His public writing has appeared in such places as The Washington Post, Time, Forbes, and The Daily Beast. Interviews with him have aired locally, nationally, and internationally. He is currently a columnist for Smithsonian Magazine.

He's the author, with David M. Perry, of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper, 2021), and also Oathbreakers: The Civil War that Ended and Empire and Made Europe (Harper, 2024).

Reviews

[Beata · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hardly ever refuse a book on Medieval Europe and was tempted by juxoposition of the dark versus the bright. The Author's idea coincides with mine and I appreciated the effort on his side. I would welcome more of the social history as it interests me most. I should like to have a print copy on my shelf.
OverDrive, thank you!

[Jessica Rose · Rating 1 out of 5]

This really wasn't what I was expecting (an informative meander through the medieval era, highlighting all the knowledge and technology that did exist) and was instead a strange anti-Trump anti-White Supremacy manifesto that's based upon the assumption that the reader is some sort of wishywashy neo-Nazi who can be persuaded via historical anecdotes that women and minorities aren't Untermensch.

The parts where the book stays on track are interesting, that's undeniable, but the writing style and constant nudge-nudge wink-wink towards modern day politics was tiresome and bewildering. I guess I just wasn't the target audience for this. Maybe you have to be a conservative white man to really appreciate it.

Also, this falls foul of something I always see self-appointed Progressive White Men™ stumble on - the idea that because one women (or minority, etc) had power once, then that means the past wasn't horrifically misogynistic (or racist, etc). Galla Placidia being regent while her son was too young to reign doesn't mean Rome was a bastion of equality, which is the shakey supposition the rest of the house of cards that is The Bright Ages is built upon. No one would argue that Mary and Elizabeth's reign makes Tudor England not sexist. No one would say Wu Zetian's existence made Tang China not sexist. And thus Galla Placidia spending a dozen years in charge does not a Bright society make! And only a man could write of the Vikings committing gang rape, and then follow it up by talking merely of their "supposed misogyny".

There were also a few errors re: Turkish vs Turkic towards the end of the book, and also Mongolian being called a Uighur script despite Old Uyghur/Yugur being a very different thing to Uighur (which is, despite the name, actually a Karluk language). This might seem like a petty thing to get hung up on, but considering the somewhat callous way (a single throwaway sentence!) the author covered the mass rape, murder, and forced conversion of the population of Altishahr and surrounding cities, I feel like he ought to have at least pretended to have enough respect for Central Asian history to not make such basic mistakes.

All in all, this felt like it was written backwards - that the author came to a conclusion ("the past wasn't racist or sexist, actually!!! minorities were beloved and women had agency!!! look at this one Roman woman who might have married her captor willingly!!! take that, bigots!!!") and then cherrypicked parts of medieval history to prove it. Not worth reading, in my opinion. Though the cover is very pretty.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 bright stars for a very readable history book on what used to be called "The Dark Ages." The authors make a convincing case that there was a continuity with the Roman legacy, both in Western and Eastern Europe. They cite many examples for their thesis that these were "The Bright Ages." One of these examples is the ceiling in a chapel in Ravenna, Italy. This blue sky ceiling is decorated with gold stars. It was commissioned by Galla Placida, sister of a Roman Emperor, queen of the Visigoths, and eventually regent herself of the Western Roman Empire. This book is well suited for the lay person. There are no footnotes, but a bibliography of recommended books.
Two quotes:
"The Bright Ages contain the beauty and light of stained glass in the high ceilings of the cathedral, the blood and sweat of the people who built them, the golden relics of the Church, the acts of charity and devotion by people of deep faith, but also the wars fought over ideas of the sacred, the scorched flesh of the heretics burned in the name of intolerance and fear. The Bright Ages reveal the permeable nature of the interwoven cultures of Europe in the thousand or so years before Dante."
"When the Vikings found wealth and weak political culture, they raided. When the Vikings found transregional trade routes, they traded. When they found strong leaders seeking soldiers, they served. And when they found empty land, they farmed."

I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. Thanks to the authors and Harper books for sending me this book.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping that the book would convince me that the Dark Ages were not all that dark. Unfortunately, it did not convince me in the least that these were not dark ages. At best, the book shows that the Dark Ages might not have been as bad as I thought. The book did a barely adequate job of discussing medieval history, and even then, I felt that the book was strongly oriented toward a too-detailed discussion of Christianity. Indeed, there was little discussion of inventions and science of medieval times, in particular, astronomy. The only reason I finished the book is because of the authors’ great conversational tone and writing style. Thank you to Netgalley and HarperCollins Canada for the advance reader copy.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. But it throws so much at the reader, often times out of order and with limited context, and tries to do too much. It ends up doing none of it well. The prose is readable but suffers from odd syntax, typographical errors, occasional run on sentences, and lack of clear transitions that show how sections logically flow into the next thought or story. Blanket statements and assertions are made without always giving evidence to back up said statements. I find the lack of footnotes, a works cited page, and bibliography disturbing. This makes it hard to cross reference their research with other books on Medieval history. The further reading section is not well laid out either. The book's attempt at commentary on current trends in modern politics and historiography felt forced and out of place. There is little to no discussion of art, science, music, or literature. Referring to the Medieval period as the bright ages became tiresome, much like this book, after a while. The book told me history is complicated but didn't show it. Much of the violence is only somewhat addressed. It was apparently good to be a woman during this era. Sick 'em Christine de Pizan! Oh wait, you left her out of your book... You cherry picked stories to fit a narrative. You also left out the era of the three Popes, the 100 years war, the Hussites, and a larger framework for the stories you did tell. Now were those stories interesting but somewhat boringly told? Yes. Is this book completely without merit? No. There are interesting historical people in this book. I just sadly think you will have a better understanding of them and their contributions to history and our present day by reading the Middle Ages: A Graphic History or watching Extra Credit History and Overly Sarcastic Productions on YouTube than by reading this book.

[Marco · Rating 1 out of 5]

TL, DR: don't read this book. It's full of inaccuracies and twists historical evidence to support the authors' view, often with incredibly large omissions of context. Pretty much any other book about the european middle ages I've ever read is more informative. It's also much less progressive in outlook than the authors would us like to believe.

=====

FULL RANT:

This book is terrible. It's the worst kind of pop history writing: the authors have a thesis, and will throw scattered facts and pretty words at the reader to make it sound more convincing.
But they do so with such dramatic omissions of relevant context, that either the authors are ignorant about the time period (which I don't think), or they just don't care, they're willing to stretch the truth past its breaking point as long as it sounds like it supports their thesis.

And their real point boils down to a confused "gotcha!" at - they make it clear, and spell it out - modern american conservatives. Except the book isn't targeted at them, it's targeted at readers who'll feel good by reading imaginary arguments against imaginary conservatives.

If you want to actually learn something about the Middle Ages, or the end of the Roman Empire, look elsewhere. The book is full of small inaccuracies, (and it's telling that I spot them despite not being an expert, it shows how little the authors cared for accuracy), but the real issue is the manipulative framing.

A random example: after pretending that "Rome didn't fall" by jumping East and West within the same paragraph (because the *western* roman empire fell in Vth century, but the Eastern didn't, that's nothing new or revolutionary), the book claims Rome was "still a great hub, if perhaps diminished" in the VIth century.
The fall in population of the city of Rome in the Vth century is 90-95%. That's... not what people usually mean with "somewhat diminished". And since I assume the authors know that, and manage to dance around the topic without ever mentioning the demographic collapse, the only possible conclusion is that they're actively misleading the reader, to support their thesis that there was no meaningful "fall of Rome".
(A lot of historians argue for the "continuity" description of the fall of Rome! But the serious ones don't simply ignore inconvenient data, like the depopulation of cities)

Even more damning, while waxing poetic (literally, there's a lot of flowery prose) about the "bright age" and breaking with old depictions, this book actually keeps a *very* conventional framing and outlook. It talks a lot about dismantling white supremacy, but remarkably, it doesn't include northern africa in its narrative, except in passing - which is an infuriatingly outdated and *anglocentric* approach in discussing mediterranean history.
It mentions the Eastern Roman empire when it's convenient to claim that "Rome didn't fall," but beside that throwaway note, it literally gives less information about it than the wikipedia page - never mind its rich, long history which was an important (and overlooked) factor in european history for 700 years after the fall of the west.

In the same way, this book can scarcely name a woman without adding "look! she had agency! she was not just a pawn of the men around her!", and then pats itself in the back for being progressive, but it names only the most famous women of the time period, the ones *already* in any intro history book and historical fiction. Lesser-known women (like Amalasuntha) don't get a name, they are "the king's daughter", or defined by their husbands. Which... again, is pretty typical, but becomes much more infuriating in a book that makes a point of being progressive.

It also keeps trying to surprise the reader by setting incredibly low bars, and showing the middle ages were better than that. You'll learn there were "always at least some" people of color in England! No shit. And international trade "never ended entirely!" - did anyone ever claim it did? It unironically tries to surprise readers by saying that different religions "don't always go to existential war with each other."
Basically, since the facts are inconvenient (long distance trade DID collapse, the roman empire WAS much more cosmopolitan than later christian european polities, for several centuries), it side-steps them, claims something that is *inevitably true*, and hopes to leave the reader with the wrong impression, without technically lying.

I understand the value of pushing back against the very outdated Dark Ages narrative. But there's no need to lie to the reader - because lies they are, if by omission and framing - to do that. Any good book about late antiquity and the european middle ages has plenty of facts to debunk the idea that it was uniformly an age of ignorance, poverty and superstition.
Late antiquity is fascinating, full of very real people who did their best to adapt to a changing world and a collapsing order. Their stories are worth telling and remembering.

But the book approaches this in the worst possible way: pretending the collapse of Western Rome didn't happen (or wasn't meaningful).
In the same vein, what's the value of talking about continuity with the islamic conquest of the eastern mediterranean, *and then ignoring islamic history*?
Why even start with the whole "history is written mostly by males", which is *absolutely true*, if you don't spare a single line about the condition of women in any of the many, different medieval societies, but just add a "look! a woman!" every time you mention one?
The book doesn't actually mention the eastern roman empresses, or, say, the *actual medieval female historian* Anna Komnene, because it doesn't actually care about the East, nor about women.
This is firmly a book about Italy, central europe and britain, like a lot of english-language historiography tends to be, but it doesn't aknowledge it.

This is a book that wants to challenge old, patriarchal, elit framings, but the authors can't be bothered to do the work for it, they just lazily tell the history of medieval europe (a span so large in time and space, I automatically find suspicious a book that wants to deal with all of it without a narrow focus, tbth) in the same old, tired way, but contriving a few "new" interpretations and repeating "look! a woman!", "look! a person of color!" like that makes it novel and progressive.

[Shelby · Rating 1 out of 5]

(This book made me so mad I hit the Goodreads character limit. See the comments for the conclusion to this dissertation lol.)

When I showed my friend this book, she immediately flipped to the back flap to look at the photos of the authors and said, "They look like they would mansplain to me." And frankly, I can think of no criticism more damning than that. This book has insane mansplaining energy. That's all you need to know.

But of course, me being me, I can't just leave this review at one pithy paragraph. I need to RANT because this book PISSED ME OFF.

First, a little background. Let me whip out my limited credentials. I have a bachelor's degree in English and also earned a certificate in medieval and early modern studies. While that probably sounds incredibly fancy, all it means is that I took enough classes about medieval literature and Shakespeare that my advisor was like, "Hey, you pretty much have enough credits to add this certificate" and I said, "Sure." I would not claim to be any sort of expert in the medieval period despite this certificate--most of my coursework for the certificate was focused on literature (occupational hazards of being an English major), rather than history. I only took one survey course about medieval history, and the rest of my knowledge of the medieval period came as it related to the texts I studied in my lit class (because, of course, literature is never divorced from the period it's written in, but I digress). So I would say I'm slightly beyond an armchair historian when it comes to the Middle Ages. Maybe like...an office chair historian. I probably have a little more interest in the Middle Ages than your average person, but I am also not an official medieval historian like the authors of this book are.

My medieval literature and medieval history professors in college came from a similar school of thought as the authors (Gabriele and Perry) of this book. One of the first things my medieval lit professor covered in class was debunking misconceptions about the Middle Ages (they lived in perpetual filth! They all died at the ripe old age of 22! They were totally stupid and had no idea the world was round!) My professor's passion was infectious and since college, I've also been on a bit of an informal campaign to dispel people of the outdated "Dark Ages" notion. So I was thrilled when I stumbled upon this book in the library, a book that is committed to the notion of giving a more nuanced depiction of the Middle Ages. Because the Middle Ages was like any other period of human history: there was profound beauty and innovation, but there was also great brutality and cruelty.

Presenting this more nuanced view of the medieval era is Gabriele and Perry's thesis, so let it be known that I don't disagree with this book's fundamental argument. Nor do I disagree with the other points Perry and Gabriele bring up in service to this more nuanced depiction of the Middle Ages. I appreciated that this book wanted to highlight voices that are often sidelined in discussions of the medieval period. In the introduction, Perry and Gabriele talk about wanting to highlight the diversity of the era, and I fully support that endeavor. (Whether they accomplished that goal is a completely different matter--more on that later.) In fact, I almost gave this book 2 stars because, if nothing else, I appreciated the effort to bring some nuance to an era that's been simplified and maligned in the mainstream view.

But this book does such a bad job that I can't in good conscience give it 2 stars. The single star is for effort--anything higher would belie how dreadful I found this book.

First off, The Bright Ages is difficult to get through just on a sentence level. The prose is frequently awkward and ungainly--sentences run on; subjects and verbs are separated by so much extra fluff that it's hard to follow what the point of the sentence was to begin with. The number of times I had to reread sentences and paragraphs because I couldn't figure out what the authors were trying to say was too high for what was supposed to be an accessible history of an era I studied in college. In theory, I like Gabriele and Perry's unpretentious, conversational tone--I'm always a huge fan of nonfiction books that have voice and personality. The problem is, Gabriele and Perry are deeply unfunny. Their references were outdated by the time the book released. It's like watching your dad on Twitter trying to keep up with the memes and jokes, only to reference memes that were popular 4 years ago. I almost gave up on the book after reading a sentence about how Justinian I, emperor of the Byzantine Empire, "wasn't going to throw away his shot" when political instability presented an opportunity for him to claim power. A Hamilton reference in my pop history book published in 2021? Come on, now. (Not that Hamilton invented the phrase "not throwing away your shot," but given how Online and Hip Perry and Gabriele are trying to present themselves, I have a hard time believing this wasn't meant to be a Hamilton reference.)

Going along with the clunky prose, it's unclear who this book is for, anyway. At times, Perry and Gabriele spend paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing events that anyone who took high school world history would be familiar with, while at other times, they race through historical events and names as if everyone reading this book has the level of specialized knowledge that they do. This book manages to paradoxically be redundant for anyone who's taken a few medieval history classes while also being bewildering to anyone who doesn't have PhD in the dang thing. I understand that this book is trying to cover 1000 years of history in 250 pages, so there wasn't much time to go into depth, but, well, maybe they should have considered giving themselves a little more room to breath. I understand being accessible, but I also don't think a 400-page book covering 1000 years of history is ridiculous.

Then there's the arguments themselves. Perry and Gabriele's claims frequently read like an undergraduate student desperately trying to make an argument in an essay they're writing for their survey history class they're required to take for graduation. I should know, because I wrote plenty of papers like this myself in college--frenzied, bullshit attempts to connect the dots between events I only had a surface knowledge of. If you were to play a drinking game with this book and take a shot every time the authors write something along the lines of "Much in the same way [X event] happened, [Y event] also happened," you would be dead of alcohol poisoning by page 50. It's true, as the authors frequently remind us, that "history does not repeat itself but echoes," but I would expect a little more subtlety and grace from two professors of medieval history than the most obvious connections and parallels.

Perry and Gabriele gesture to these sweeping arguments, but then provide little documentation or evidence to back them up. I'm not trying to play devil's advocate or say they're lying (again, I agree with their fundamental arguments), but in a history book--even a pop history book--I'd like to see harder evidence in support of the claims the book is making. The Bright Ages lacks any footnotes or endnotes or, y'know, anything that position this book more clearly in the wider field of medieval studies. There is a further reading list at the end of the book that I assume serves as something of a bibliography--based on how they talk about these books, Gabriele and Perry surely used them as references. But these books aren't linked as citations to specific sentences. They're just waved at, like, "Oh, hey, we mentioned this person in chapter 4 and here's a book on them." Like, great, thank you, those are the kind of precise citations and references I like to see in my nonfiction. Vague gesticulations.

And if ever a book needed concrete evidence to ground its assertions, it's this one, because boy, are Perry and Gabriele STRETCHING with some of their arguments. To be clear, I don't think Perry and Gabriele are trying to handwave away the atrocities of the Middle Ages, but in their gallant quest to make the period seem like less of the "Dark Ages," it sure does come across that way. Whatever their intentions, they failed in execution. This book props up random women to be like, "See?? Women weren't just shrinking violets in the Middle Ages!!" Never mind that this line of thought feels like the "I'm not like other girls" or "girlboss" of historical argument ("This woman was into POLITICS, versus all these losers who just...stayed at home"), it's also just not incredibly nuanced. Frequently, Perry and Gabriele point to various individual women holding power and make it sound as though this means the Middle Ages were completely egalitarian. (Again, and I cannot stress this enough, I don't think that's the argument they were TRYING to make, but that's how it comes across). They look at Galla Placidia, a Roman woman who ruled as regent before her son came of age to assume the role of emperor himself, and often, the way they write about her is used to make sweeping statements about women in the Middle Ages. "Women had ALWAYS been involved in politics, so THERE." Yes, of course, they had always been involved in politics! But a woman ruling as regent for her son--who will immediately assume the power when he turns 18, regardless of his qualifications--does not a Feminism make. The book often leaves its analysis of women's roles there, just pointing to times they held power and then...doing nothing more with it. Probably I would be less annoyed by this if I was not a) a woman and b) someone who wrote several papers on the various ways medieval women negotiated their power within the patriarchal structures of the era. Like, yes, great, we've established women navigated the political spheres of the Middle Ages as often as the men did, but can we get more analysis and nuance as to how that looked different for women than it did for men? Or how women who held power in the Middle Ages often upheld patriarchy and didn't necessarily make the world more egalitarian for other women? No? Okay.

Truly the crowning moment of Feminism (TM) in this book has got to be its discussion of Viking treatments of women. The authors relay an account of the funeral procession a Rus leader. As part of the funeral, one of the leaders' female slaves is sacrificed (to follow him to the afterlife) and before her murder, she is serially raped by other Rus men. How do our authors play this off as some Feminist (TM) moment? By saying that we shouldn't take this episode of brutal violence against a woman as the Vikings' overall view of women!! If you were a Viking woman (and not someone they had conquered and enslaved from another group of people), then you could expect a fair amount of gender parity for the era. And while the authors are not wrong about the equality that existed between Viking men and women, it felt incredibly careless to hold up that equality against the brutal violence that was exerted upon this enslaved woman. Whether or not this ritual rape and murder was a common happening in Viking cultures, it did happen, and if we're going to give a fully nuanced portrait of the Middle Ages, then the book needs to do more than handwave away instances of gendered violence by saying, "But it wasn't like that for everybody!!"

Indeed, for a book that prides itself on highlighting the marginalized perspectives of women and people of color and people of lower social status (peasants, the enslaved), the book...really does not do much to highlight any of these perspectives. I've ranted enough about how women are treated in this book, but equally frustrating is how this book pays lip service to centering the diversity of the Middle Ages and then...mostly focusing on the same stories we've heard time and time again in world history classes (hey, guys, did you know the Plague was a thing?) At one point, the authors say that we cannot ignore or cast off the experiences of enslaved people during the Middle Ages. I fully agree with that premise. But beyond that one sentence, the authors proceed to...mostly ignore the existence of slavery in the Middle Ages, only sometimes commenting on how it was a holdover from antiquity or how it was not identical to the chattel slavery that developed in America. This is all true, but I'm baffled as to why the authors say we shouldn't ignore the existence and experiences of enslaved people, only to hardly focus on them or analyze slavery's role in the Middle Ages in any way.

And outside of a few discussions of happenings in places like Egypt and Marrakesh, as well as a chapter about the Mongol Empire, this book is primarily focused on the same Western European countries we always hear about in mainstream accounts of the period. The line that really made me want to chuck this book across the room--more than the stupid Hamilton reference, more than the vague rape apologia--was the following:

"In the stories we're telling, we may not get to spend much time south of the Sahara, but that region had its own bright ages of gold, nation-building, intellectual life, and conflict."

*record scratch*

I'm sorry, what? YOU WROTE THE DAMN BOOK. What do you mean you may not get to spend much time south of the Sahara? Why not? As the authors of this book, did you not have the authority to decide which regions you focused on? I understand that this was supposed to be a brief, survey view of the Middle Ages, so the choice to primarily recontextualize well-known events of the era is not completely out of nowhere, if the purpose of this book is to have people reexamine their assumptions about the medieval period. But you know what else would force people to reexamine their assumptions about the Middle Ages? Looking at areas that are never focused on at all when talking about the Middle Ages. So much of our assumptions about the Middle Ages is centered around (not always accurate or greatly exaggerated) history of Western Europe, and while I appreciate Perry and Gabriele's attempts to dispel some of those myths, so why not focus on places that were...not Western Europe? Again, they sort of do. They talk about the Byzantine Empire, in the same way that most medieval textbooks do: for a chapter to be like, "Oh yeah, the Eastern Roman Empire morphed into the Byzantine Empire and they did some stuff! Apparently not enough stuff to justify more than a chapter, but stuff!" Besides Constantinople (again, for like a chapter) little to no attention is given to the Kievan Rus or Poland or Hungary or anywhere east of France. Besides the chapter on Genghis Khan and the Mongols, not much is said about anything that was happening in Asia at the time. Aside from a PARAGRAPH about Mansa Musa and the few sections on Egypt and Marrakesh, hardly anything is said about what happened in Africa at this time, which makes the sentence I quoted above even more galling. We're not going to go more in depth about the Mali Empire? Or any of the empires in Africa that existed during these centuries? Anything more on the Great Zimbabwe, aside from a throwaway reference about how its abandonment might have been due to plague?

(Any references to the Americas begins and ends with noting that the Vikings who came to North America had contact with the indigenous people. Nothing else is said about any of the indigenous groups in North or South America.)

And you could make the argument that, again, Perry and Gabriele are trying to overturn common assumptions about the Middle Ages, and most people's assumptions are based on that image of Western Europe. You could also argue that the Middle Ages or the idea of a medieval (medium aevum) is a European idea in general--it's based on a very Eurocentric reading of history that looks at the era between (or, y'know, in the middle of) the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, events that, of course, don't map onto continents and regions that didn't experience that same history (we discussed this in my medieval history and medieval lit classes frequently, and I don't at all want to say that we should just force Asia, Africa, North America, and South America into Europe-shaped history. That's nonsense and flattens all the developments and history taking place on those continents). But Perry and Gabriele keep alluding to these other regions and claiming their history is so much more inclusive and diverse and then...do nothing to actually showcase that diversity. Like, commit to one or the other, guys. If you just want to center on Western Europe, because that's what's taken hold in popular imagination, that's fine, but then don't keep waving at other areas of the world and lamenting what a shame it is that you don't get to talk about more of Africa when (did I make this clear enough) YOU WROTE THE BOOK and YOU HAD FULL CONTROL OF WHAT WENT INTO. Don't give me half-assed noncommitment to your subjects, because the people and places you're talking about deserve better than a "Goshdarn shame we don't have time for that today! Anyway, back to Dante, a dude who has been discussed to death that we have nothing new to say about."

There are other things I could yell about, like the way Perry and Gabriele keep referring to this era as "the Bright Ages" in a way that feels like trying to make "fetch" happen in Mean Girls. It's one thing for them to allude to it as the "Bright Ages" in their introduction, as a sort of winking commentary and pushback against the "Dark Ages." But then Perry and Gabriele KEEP USING the term throughout the book as if it's a seriously accepted academic term in the field, and it gave me so much secondhand embarrassment, watching these two pretentious authors use their own appellation for the era instead of just calling it the Middle Ages or medieval era like...any other scholar in the field.

Or I could complain about the way Perry and Gabriele can never really commit to what, exactly, makes the Bright Ages so bright. It's bright because of the artwork and architecture. It's bright because of gold reliquaries. It's bright because of violence, warfare, and persecution that led to fires being lit. In the hands of better authors, the various applications of "bright" to this period could have emphasized how nuanced and three-dimensional their portrait of the Middle Ages was. But because these authors are so superficial in their analysis, these various applications just come across as a kid rambling about their cool new toy. "It shoots LASERS and it's BLUE and it's AWESOME."

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting to observe the reaction to online articles that accompanied the release of this book. A remarkable number of the comments on these articles were by people who seemed, despite not having actually read the book yet, outraged that it existed. The idea that anyone would characterise the Middle Ages as not simply "not-actually-a-dark-age" but as "the Bright Ages" seemed genuinely offensive to these commenters, with no small number of them taking it upon themselves to list several things from the Middle Ages that were bad (real and imagined), which they seemed to think somehow shattered Gabriele and Perry's thesis. Others were convinced, from what little they knew about the book, that the authors were "right wing traditional Catholic revisionists", determined to rewrite the "true" history of the period in the name of their faith. This was odd, given that other commenters were equally convinced these writers were "left-wing culture warriors", trying to make medieval history "woke". Exactly how they could somehow be both these things is far from clear.

Of course, the reason some resist any correction of the negative stereotypes about the Middle Ages is those clichés are deeply rooted in the mythology that underpins the modern western world and founded on prejudices, both cultural and religious, that most people have absorbed since childhood. Accepting that they may actually be wrong is too hard for some. Gabriele and Perry's fairly short but compact and eloquent book, if the naysayers ever bothered to read it, would go a long way toward a more rounded, nuanced and accurate view of a period that is widely misunderstood. As they state in their Epilogue, historians spend most of their time explaining how "it's more complicated than that".

This does not mean this is some book of radical revisionism, contrary to accepted historical views. On the contrary, anyone who has studied the Middle Ages here will find nothing much that is new at all and will spend a lot of time thinking "yes, I've been trying to tell people this for years!" Nor do the authors present a sanitised or prettified view of this period, which they actually show warts and all, with its ugly and violent sides as well as the opposite. But the point is that this period of European history is almost always presented with an emphasis on the ugly, the violent and the weird, despite being no more or less ugly and violent than, say, the Roman Period or later centuries. This book is about redressing balance and maintaining a multifaceted view of a time often presented in one dimension (and usually wrongly even then).

There is no way historians could fully detail a whole millennium of history in just 300 pages, so each chapter takes a series of illustrative vignettes as a framework for discussion of various themes, though arranged in a generally chronological order. The effect is that they cover a very broad range of ideas in reasonable detail and keep the narrative interesting and often amusing. Again, the stories they choose will be very familiar with medievalists, but likely to be surprising, perhaps, to general readers. Topics that are often presented in polemical and partisan ways - the Crusades, for example - are given a rounded and balanced treatment that helps the reader put aside modern value judgements and preconceptions and look at how and why these events happened. This is about not judging history, even when it is very strange to us.

There is a strong sense, particularly from the book's Introduction and Epilogue, that it was inspired at least in part by the way the Middle Ages have been seized upon, utilised and misused in recent political discourse. This includes the way anti-theistic activists present the period as one of unalloyed religious repression and darkness and the alt-right's weird fantasy version of it as a white supremacist wonderland. This means that some of the topical references to things like the 2017 Charlottesville rally, the Christchurch mosque shootings of 2019 and the 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection are going to date fairly quickly. The authors also use the jargon common in American academic and political discourse - "people of colour, "gendered" and "enslaved people" etc. - which, given the way such language changes periodically, could seem dated, quaint or even prim and odd in the not too distant future. This makes this book one that could be somewhat of its time. Luckily the bulk of the contents and insights are fairly timeless.

Any book that covers such a broad swathe of time will have details that could be quibbled over. On pp. 27-8 the authors refer to Justinian's closing of the Academy in Athens - an event that many popular writers mischaracterise badly. So it's disappointing that in a book that sets out to set things straight, the Academy that was closed is referred to as "an august school of philosophy with its roots in antiquity". In fact, this was not the Academy founded by Plato, but a much later school which took the same name. It was small, mystical, not especially "august" and not very significant at all. And it was closed because it was vehemently anti-Christian. All that aside, the authors go on to argue this closure was not evidence of Christian anti-intellectualism because Justinian sponsored a new legal system, new engineering etc. That's all true, but a better and more apposite point to make would be that plenty of other schools of ancient learning continued to flourish with the full encouragement of the Church and the emperor, and the closing of the little militantly pagan salon in Athens was not indicative of any imagined "closing of the western mind". This is still often claimed (including just last year in a very popular book by Dan Jones), so an opportunity was missed here.

But many opportunities were not missed in this book, but caught and held up to the reader. The repeated references to brightness, light, colour and beauty in the Medieval World are deliberate, deft and culminative. As a counter to the persistent inaccurate Hollywood depiction of this period as one of drab clothing, dark castles and dank hovels, the medieval love of pageantry, bright clothes, decoration and display is emphasised. And the Epilogue gives a good summary of why a period that was actually rich, varied, innovative and fascinating has been unfairly denigrated and misrepresented. The authors are unlikely to have convinced the naysayers noted above, who I doubt will ever bother to read this excellent book. But anyone who does take the time to do so will be well rewarded.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 thoughts soon.

[Serge · Rating 3 out of 5]

A commonly accepted historical terminology for the very tumultuous period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and 1520 AD is "The Dark Ages", since during that time, Europe, and the rest of the known world, were dealing with the aftermath of the fall of Rome, which was considered to be that one "civilized entity" that kept the fabric of the known world together. When Rome fell, that fabric was torn apart, and Europe fell into the chaos of the feuding "barbarians" who brought upon wars after wars. No significant economic or cultural growth is considered to have come out during this stage, and the Western world was overshadowed by the comparatively advanced civilizations of Arabia and China. This is the narrative that has been widely accepted by most historians, however, Matthew Gabriele challenges this view, seeing this period as a unique transformative phase which changed Roman Europe into the Europe we know today.

He has renamed this period as "The Bright Ages", showing the reader how a simple change in terminology can change one's perspective on a certain area in drastic ways. During these Bright Ages, Europe became a melting pot of different cultures. Once the Germanic tribes crossed the sacred border dividing the lands of the Romans from the lands of the barbarians a century before the Empire fell, the demographics of Europe changed quite drastically. A particularity on this take of this time period is that the author claims that the fall of the Roman Empire was not truly the case, and in some sense, this is true, since the eastern half of the Roman Empire did continue existing during this period, and they did in many instances reclaim land that once belonged to the Western Empire. As for the people who ruled Europe during those times, they also pulled from the legacy of the Roman Empire, many of them claiming to be legitimate descendants of the lost empire. So theoretically speaking, one can claim that Rome never "truly" disappeared during this time period, its influences still being a driving force in this chaos.



The author shows the reader how current narratives framed by white supremacists to justify certain political choices go back to these so called Dark Ages, and he successfully makes the case that religious dogma can be potentially used as a fuel to commit mass atrocities. The crusades that took place during that period are the clearest example, since the message of liberating Jerusalem from its "Muslim oppressors" has led to a literal massacre, where the crusaders stormed into Jerusalem and covered the city in blood, butchering people they don't even know driven solely by an abstract cause. Those same Christian factions eventually committed a similar atrocity against their fellow Christians, when they sacked Constantinople in 1204, the capital of the Christian Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. Why? Because the Pope claimed that those Christians are not true Christians but are enemies of the religion. We see this brainwashing repeating itself time and time again throughout history, with many innocent lives being cruelly taken away as a result.

Like any history book, this book can drown one in the details regarding dates and names and very specific information that can be exhausting to keep up with, but the relatively short length of the book and the large time span it covered did satisfy my curiosity to learn about this period. My next reading endeavours when it comes to history will focus on different regions in the world outside the orbit of Europe during these times. I do recommend this book if you want to have a different take on The Dark Ages, and to see how certain narratives relating to that time period push political agendas to this very day.



“Scientists can measure the oxygen isotopes in dental enamel to determine where in the world long-dead people were born. From the Bronze Age through to the medieval period, we’re finding people buried in British graves who were born in Asia and Africa. That number peaked, unsurprisingly, during the Roman period, but never falls to zero throughout the Middle Ages.”

[WarpDrive · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas and perspectives, but this book unfortunately presents an unbalanced, disingenuously selective and biased analysis of facts, all tailored towards a fundamentally woke interpretation of history that sometimes reads more like political propaganda or preaching than an actual history book.

[Tom LA · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m more baffled than anything else. This is a book that purports to demonstrate that the Middle Ages have been “Bright” as opposed to “Dark”.

The authors, however, never even try to define the problem that the book is supposed to be addressing.

I know there is a vague tradition of viewing the Middle Ages as “dark”, but… what about it? Who were the main proponents of that view? What did they actually mean by “dark”? And, in God’s name, how would you define “bright” as opposed to “dark”, exactly?

Nothing. Astonishingly, not even one page on that. How can I take you seriously if you start the case for the “brightness” by giving the terms of the argument for granted, implying them rather than exposing them?

We are supposed to open our eyes towards this vague “brightness” of the Middle Ages while other (the “bad”) history professors focus on the rampant violence, religious persecution, and societal inequities of the era.

The problem is, both these positions are wrong. History is always very nuanced and mixed truth: even the authors acknowledge that at some point, but they do not apply this principle to their book, by using the distorted and undefined lens of “brightness” as a category.

Let me be clear: the details included in the book are historically accurate, the writing style is engaging, and one can find a lot of interesting tidbits here and there.

It’s the architecture of this book that doesn’t work. The under-developed context. The futile perspective.

For example: I actually don’t think the authors realize that different people used the term “Dark Ages” with different meanings. Edward Gibbon’s take cannot be compared with a modern take on this expression, because he referred to an inflated concept of the Enlightenment that he had, and to his hate for Christianity. Some refer more to the rampant violence and the low survival rates, rather than to SJW “social injustices”. When a modern journo writes “medieval”, they mean the latter, BUT if there are some today who actually write “medieval” to mean the social injustices aspect (i.e. “look at how not diverse the muslims were!”), their opinion should not matter to any serious historian. Or to anybody. Because they are troglodytes.

Sorry, but since when is judging the past through societal norms of today a smart thing to do?

Additionally, the societal norms used as a filter by the authors are pretty much liberal / social justice norms - so, they’re not even universally accepted, and they never existed until maybe 15 - 20 years ago.

I became afraid that this might be yet another case of “in-house fighting” within academia with tinges of liberal ideology, and sure enough, it actually is. Read the dedication here:

“To all our colleagues working to exorcise the ghosts of medieval studies that still haunts us, laboring to make the study of the past a MORE JUST, OPEN AND WELCOMING FIELD”.

What they are saying is that there are “some” in academia who use the “dark” type of narrative, while they are the enlightened and moral ones, who fight against injustice in the field of history (while not even defining the terms of the battle).

Who cares? Why would anyone who doesn’t have a bone in that petty fight be interested even slightly in it? People who are interested in history want to read history, not “petty fights about history as seen through modern ideological lenses”, full of 2025 terms like “patriarchy”, “diversity” and “white supremacy”, which are terms that should NEVER show up in a serious history book about the Middle Ages.

But, as that wise man said, “Every historian writes AGAINST someone”. That’s so true for these two authors. Hopefully not for every historian.

Also, as a historian you should be aware that in today’s US there are not even 7,000 white supremacists, a hard fact that often surprises people who like to talk about white supremacists.

The authors constantly shift between pretending to make a good point (that the Middle Ages were complicated and nuanced like any other age, and nothing was always completely dark and gritty), and actually making a not-clever point, namely that the crucial characteristics that made the Middle Ages “bright” were … wait for it … Diversity, Inclusion and Tolerance!

Sounds like they should have titled it “The Woke Ages”.

A ridiculous and unserious book.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this book in a goodreads drawing.

In the field of comic books, a common premise is "Everything You Know About X Is Wrong." The vast majority of these tales are terrible (Alan Moore's Swamp Thing being a notable exception.)

This book takes the idea into academia, where it doesn't work so well either. The authors, pretending Huizinga and other authors don't exist, tell us what "we know" about the middle ages is wrong, and that they weren't "Dark" but "Bright." Throughout, there is the aroma of fear of being cancelled.

A reader might learn something, but anyone who is familiar with the era should probably skip it.

[Marcy Graybill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at old evidence with new eyes. The authors' premise is that Rome did not fall, it just was redesigned, and the dark ages were not so dark. They focused mostly on Christianity and left out many of the scientific discoveries of the times. I enjoyed the writing style it's definitely accessible to the average reader. Covering nearly a thousand years and ranging from Western Europe to Africa and Asia, there's no possible way it can go into historical details, leaving out quite a bit of information. For someone who is interested in history this would be a great overview of what really happened during the Middle Ages.

[Александър Стоянов · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book sets on a path of depicting the Middle Ages in a new, bright light. The "bright light" motive is repeated in each chapter. The perspective is intended to be modern-liberal.
Unfortunately the end result is somewhat wanting. Terms like "white supremacists" just hang in the air, as if deliberately stuffed in the narrative.
The book is West-centric even though it strives to show us a New Look at Medieval Europe. Russia, Poland, Scandinavia, Baltics and Balkans are all left out.
The narrative is somewhat only touching upon facts and stories. There is a general lack of depth and a trend of generalisation - things the authors claim are the reason why the Middle Ages were thus far wrongfully perceived in the first place.
For a historian that is in no way expert in the period, the book offers too few new facts and info. It claims to build a new perspective on Medieval history, but that new perspective has been taught to me in highschool two decades ago, so nothing new here.
For a non-historian the book would probably seam chaotic and blurry. Too many names and places are out of context. The study lacks a proper set of footnotes to explain terms and places. Some basic understanding of Christian and Muslim dogma is required for any Medieval study. None is provided.
The idea of a liberal new look at the Medieval period is a good thing. Turning this idea into words didn't work out quite fine.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t feel that the book offered any particularly useful organizational structure. Neither did it offer any very new perspectives or original research. Still, it contains many interesting case studies of important and often positive things going on in Europe during the Middle Ages. I would say that this book made me feel more positive about Dan Jones’ more comprehensive and unified popular treatment of the same subject.

[Adam Peretz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am very interested in revisionist histories of the Medieval Period that seek to shift the focus away from the grim-dark veneer that popular culture has grafted onto it. It was, like all of the eras that came before and after it, a dynamic era of human activity that can be studied and understood without resorting to using outmoded and inaccurate terms like "the Dark Ages." Unfortunately, this book feels like it goes completely in the opposite direction by focusing on the positive, "bright" aspects of the period in its attempts to downplay the negative, "dark" associations. One area in which this is very noticeable is its treatment of slavery, which was still very much present and dynamic during this time period despite the book posing it as a lingering remnant of the Late Classical Period, at least in Italy. The authors do not seem to have engaged with recent scholarship on the international Eurasian-North African slave trade, besides where it concerns the Volga River route where they still downplayed its importance in favor of bringing in the Rus-Silk Road connection (which is also where I found an error in the writing, as the authors wrote that the Khazar leadership converted to Judaism and then to Islam in the 10th century, but the conversion of some Khazars to Islam in the aftermath of Sviatoslav's invasion was different from the initial conversion and moreover was not tied to the leadership in the same way, the Khaganate having been mostly destroyed by that point).

Beyond the topic of slavery, I think the title of the book and its insistence on referring to the era as "the bright age" is problematic in general because of what it chooses to focus on rather than what it chooses not to. It is true that art, music, and other examples of high culture continued throughout this time period, but to me that would still make the term "bright age" hyperbolic at best given the general state of society at the time. Even before the book gets to the traditional High Medieval Period, it fails to bring up events such as the Hungarian Migration to Carpathia and the subsequent raids throughout Europe, occurring at the same time as the Viking raids in Western and Eastern Europe. Eastern European raids from Rus, Turkic groups, Hungarians, and local Slavic groups resulted in archaeologically significant depopulation of Slavic populations from the Elbe River into Russia, funneled into the slave trade. This was also a period that I would identify as pivotal to the emergence of modern Europe, so while I disagree with the hyperbole of the title and the term, I don't think the book is without merit.

[Kathryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a no from me. I seriously thought about dropping this one five minutes into the introduction. It is incredibly heavy with leftist ideology. I wouldn't mind a different take on Medieval Europe, but I was distracted and irritated by the authors' random tangents and jabs at the "far right". So unnecessary. This historical writing wasn't worth it. I don't know how the authors managed it, but they both overly demonized and overly glorified the Middle Ages in one fell swoop. Well, I guess I do know how. The authors took everything "barbaric" about the Middle Ages and compared it to modern neo-conservatives, while painting with a broad brush so as to include everyone on the right, and took everything "bright" and supposedly enlightened about the Middle Ages and equated it with modern leftists, also with an equally broad brush and completely ignoring the fact that some of these virtues are Biblical. So, now I'm annoyed and on the lookout for a better survey of Medieval Europe without the heavy-handed political commentary.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors argue that the medieval period in Europe should not be regarded as a time of cultural stagnation, violence and misery. In short chapters, they survey the many developments of that period: from the rise of Islam to the theological development of Christianity, from female power to intercontinental trade routes, from the influence of the Vikings to growth in architecture. The authors include elements like the Crusades and the Black Death and argue that even these negative parts of this period need to be understood differently. Because the authors cover an enormous amount of material in a relatively few number of pages, nothing is discussed with any depth. Hopefully it leads the reader to further reading on the topics of interest. 3.5 stars

[Laika · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, the Harper Collins strike is over, so I can finally post this! As you might notice, the wait has meant I have ended up writing far too much of it. Turns out people really are telling the truth when they say writing negative reviews is funner and easier.

Anyway, I did not like this book! It’s an ungainly thing, torn halfway between wanting to be pop history and wanting to be an intervention in the discourse, and entirely too short to do either well. Insofar as is it history, it’s far less revolutionary than it seems to think it is, and the subjects it actually focuses on either already fit entirely into the pop understanding the book is positioning itself against, or else entirely about symbolism and architecture and generally abstracted from (being partial and small-minded) the stuff I’m actually interested in.

All that said the first and fundamental is pretty simple – it’s just altogether too short to do what it wants to. The book tries to be a history of the European Middle Ages – a thousand years of history for an entire continent (more than, given the repeated digressions about the Middle East and also the Mongols one time) – in 200 pages. Which is just, like, I mean I don’t want to say impossible, but I can’t really see any way you’d do it. Which means what we actually get is a series of snapshots, scattered across space and time – just specific, particular dynamics or situations that rarely have much to do with each other. I’m pretty sure the only specific place we ever return to after focusing on it is Ravenna, and that’s for a big, dramatic bookend starting the age with Galla Placidia and ending with Dante. Also the return is really more about Italian city states as a whole. Which is to say only Florence gets any detail at all.

A necessary causality of the snapshot approach is that there’s wide swathes of the period that just, aren’t mentioned in the slightest. Which again, fair, but also it’s a bit much for one of the lacuna to be the entire Holy Roman Empire, right? (Okay, not the entire, there’s repeated off hand mentions of Emperors, and also talk of how the Italian city-states fought the Empire. Just never any description whatsoever of what it, like, was. Except for the specific disavowal of saying it started with Charlemagne, which was never followed up on.) Which is still better than what Poland or Hungary or Lithuania or Kievan Rus got – if any of them were even mentioned, it was only off hand. Which does end up giving the impression that Medieval Europe included Jerusalem but not Krakow – to be fair, something a lot of actual Medieval people might have totally agree with. But given the amount of time spent on the Crusades to the Levant and the Albigensian Crusade, not even mentioning the bloody Christianize of the Baltic in passing feels negligent to the point of being actively misleading.

Also it’s weird, given the books whole focus on connections and commerce between Europe and the rider world – the steppe is right there! You don’t need to wait for the Mongols!

Speaking of – they give a bunch of apologia for the Mongol Empire that’s – well, basically the same stuff all empires get, brought safety to the roads and allowed free movement and trade, brought people together, spread culture and technology, enlightened and cosmopolitan, etc. Which I mostly just find funny because of how obvious it is the authors would, uh, probably not endorse the same sentiment for any more recent imperial projects.

But okay – it’s not that you can’t tell a useful history in what might seem to be way too little space – John Darwin tries to tell a literal history of the world from the 16th century in ~500 pages and I’d still say After Tamerlane is absolutely worthwhile reading. You just need, you know, discipline. Focus. A firm idea of your thesis and an obsession of what’s relevant to it (or just be entertaining and full of fun memorable trivia). So, what are Perry and Gabrielle actually trying to do here?

Honestly, it’s a little bit unclear? The thesis they present is that the Dark Ages didn’t exist – they insist on referring the whole Medieval period as ‘the Bright Ages’ through the entire book, it’s incredibly annoying – and that the Medieval period get a horribly unjustified bad wrap as uniquely cruel and provincial and barbaric and full of disease, illiteracy, superstition, etc. They explicitly position themselves as being a reaction to the vision of the past you see in Game of Thrones or Vikings (I’d say ‘or the Witcher’ but again, for the purposes of this book Eastern Europe doesn’t exist). Instead, they fill the book with hand picked examples of medieval beauty, sophistication, and connection to the wider world with the quite explicit contention that everything good about the Renaissance (and later) was really just outgrowths of the Medieval, and it was only the bad stuff that was new.

(At the same time, they also do not like white nationalists, and go out of their way at length on numerous occasions to remind you that Nazis are bad. Those digressions do always leave me wondering who they’re for – no actual Deus Vult type is going to get more than five pages into it, and they rarely get much deeper that surface level refutation of things no one else is likely to actually believe.)

Anyway – look, the central, overriding problem of the book is that it’s not nearly as revolutionary as it seems to think it is. Very problematic, when it has such a high opinion of itself for being so. The assorted trivia the book uses as shocking examples of how cosmopolitan and tolerant the period was mostly just, well, fit perfectly fine into the popular imagining of the Medieval era? Like ‘royals and elites imported foreign luxury goods and status symbols at great expense; missionaries, adventurers and religious emissaries travelled across Eurasia to preach, trade and try to find someone to help them invade Muslims ; women often wielded significant political influence by virtue of royal birth of marriage, and were active political players’ – are these statements shocking to literally anyone? Basically all of that literally happens in Game of Thrones!

Part of that is that the book keeps almost committing to a really radical thesis – not to say pure unreconstructed romanticism, but close to it – and then always has an attack of professional ethics and cringes away from it, and just awkwardly brings up how, to be sue, there were serfs and slaves and atrocities, but nonetheless when you think about it the later Crusader States really were fascinating sites of cultural exchange, or whatever.

Psychoanalyzing the authors is bad form, of course, but like – reading this book the overriding sense you get is that they’re proud progressives, and have dedicated their lives to studying the Medieval era. But in the contemporary discourse people on their side use ‘Medieval’ as an insult to mean patriarchal, or brutal, or cruel, and the people who like the Medieval era are all in the Sack of Jerusalem Fandom. The sheer angst and righteous indignation they have about this state of affairs just about oozes through every page – honestly if I’m being maximally pithy and uncharitable, you rather get the sense that the real aim of the book is to make ‘being really into Medieval history’ a less reactionary-coded interest to bring up at professional-class dinner parties.

But honestly I could have forgiven almost all of this if the anecdotes and snapshots the book did focus on were informative and interesting. And this is almost entirely pure personal preference, I fully acknowledge but – the things that the book chose to focus on just really weren’t, to me?

Which is to say that The Bright Ages is incredibly interested in architectural and monumental symbolism, especially of the religious variety – there are whole chapters overwhelmingly dedicated to exploring the layout of churches and how their architecture and lighting was meant to convey meaning, or detailing at great length a specific monumental cross in northern England. These are used as synecdoches for broader topics, of course but, like, an awful lot of word count really is dedicated to describing how Gala Placedia’s chapel in Ravenna must have wowed people. And even as far as using them as synecdoches – the way that monasteries, bishops and the royal household in Paris competed to have the most impressive church/chapel as a way to convey religious authority is genuinely interesting, but I’d honestly have rather heard a lot more of the actual politics and sociology or how sacred authority and legitimacy was gathered around the Capetians in the later middle ages and a lot less about how specifically impressive the royal chapel on the palace grounds was. There’s a massive amount of symbolic and artistic detail, a fair amount of time spent charting great thinkers and proving that there was too such a thing as a Medieval intellectual, and almost none at all on, like, political and social and (god forbid) economic history. Which are, unfortunately, the bits of it I’m actually interested in.

The book isn’t just architecture of course, but much of the rest is either very basic – yes, the vikings were traders as well as raiders and travelled shockingly long distances, yes there was intellectual interchange between Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across the Mediterranean, yes the Church acted as a vital sponsor of learning and scholarship. I’m sure these are new information to like, someone? - or so caught up in historiographical arguments and qualifications that it loses sight of the actual subject – I swear the book spent more time saying that it’s wrong to call it a Carolingian Renaissance because that implies there were actual dark ages before and after than it does explaining why anyone actually would.

Beyond that – okay, so as mentioned this book is really consciously progressive. Which, beyond a certain antiquarian distaste for how desperately they’re trying to get across ‘see, our field of study is Relevant! And Important! Please please please give us tenure/prestige/funding’ I wholly support. (I mean, like, I do think Medieval Studies deserves tenure/prestige/funding. Just slightly unbecoming to so transparently be grasping for it, and also more than a bit self-defeating) - but, like, the book’s politics are weird? Or weirdly surface level and slightly confused, given how much of the book is focused around them.

Like – the book spends a massive amount of time and attention combating the myth that women in the middle ages were all cloistered and politically mute and totally powerless. But the sum total of what it actually says is ‘did you know: elite women in the aristocracy and church exercised political influence? And a lot of the Christianization of western Europe happened through highborn christian women marrying pagan kings and raising their children Christian?” And while I suppose ‘elite women have influence even in patriarchal societies’ is a useful fact for someone to learn, I’m not sure examples that more or less cash out to ‘queens could have power by manipulating their husbands and sons’ is a particularly novel or progressive take, you know? More broadly – it’s a weakness of the book’s framework of jumping across countries and centuries between anecdotes that we never get any sense of gender roles and how power and influence were gendered systemically, so much as single (or if you’re very lucky, two or three) particular women with a vague gesture that they’re kind of typical. Not to complain about a lack of theory, but there’s really basically zero theory.

The book’s choices of examples for women to focus on are also – okay, not to be all ‘why didn’t you talk about my faves’, but insofar as you’re talking how women were able to exercise power, it’s really very odd that you never talk about any women who, like, ruled in their own right? C’mon, you mention the Anarchy offhand to introduce Eleanor of Aquitaine but don’t even say what it was about, let alone talk about the Empress Matilda? (I’d say the same thing about Matilda of Tuscany and the investiture Controversy, but it’s not like the book actually talks about the Investiture Controversy beyond the absolute basics, so). The final result is a book that talks a lot about how elite women had influence, and then the influence they actually bring up is almost always of the most stereotypically feminine-gender variety imaginable.

All that really pales to how confused the book seems when it talks about Christianity. Which it has to, of course, fairly constantly – it’s a book about Medieval Europe. But it’s kind of horribly torn between two imperatives here – on the one hand, it desperately wants to fight back against the whole black legend of the tyrannical, book-burning, Galileo-murdering, science-suppressing hopelessly venal and corrupt, all-powering Magesterium. But on the other, they really don’t want to come off as supporting, well, the heretic murdering and antisemitism or being the sort of guy online who posts memes of the Knights Templar. So you see this somewhat exhausting two-step where they go on at length about all the beautiful architecture and scholarship preservation the church did interrupted every so often by this concession about how of course it wasn’t all good and obviously pogroms and burning heretics wasn’t great, but- (The chapter on the vikings is much the same, except with a much clearer ‘it’s important not to romanticize these people because the people who do that are white nationalists, but also see how tolerant and far-ranging and cool they are?’)

Discussing the Church is also a place where the book’s whole allergy to social structure and institutions really serves it poorly. I at a certain point stopped keeping count of the number of times where the book called out that the centralized, papal-centric Church was a creation of the high middle ages, and not at all how things worked for most of the period. But then they just never actually explain how they worked instead, or really even how things changed to so enshrine the Pope’s power. They talk about how convents could be wealthy and powerful landholders and their abbesses’ wield significant power, but never even gesture at explaining how they interfaced with the institutional church. It’s really very frustrating.

Of course Christianity still gets far better treatment than Judaism or Islam – there’s a chapter which goes into some detail on the life of Maimonides in the process of extolling Medieval scholarship and talking about how classical learning was never really lost and the Renaissance is fake news. But despite the gestures to the presence of Jewish communities throughout Europe there’s essentially zero, like, description of how they actually functioned, or were organized, or (aside from the occasionally mentioned pogroms) how they interacted with their christian neighbours. The treatment of Islam is much the same – there are some mentions of the Islamic wold and its intellectual traditions, but essentially just to rehash the same points about the Islamic Golden age and Ibn Sina and all the other bits of trivia everyone probably picked up keeping up with the culture war during the Bush Administration. But again, only the most passing mentions of, like, politics or organization or even theology. It felt gratingly cursory, given the emphasis placed on the fact that eg Al Andulas was clearly part of Medieval Europe

Underneath all this is just the fact that The Bright Ages is almost an entirely a history of the elite. Peasants, serfs and slaves only exist in the for the sake of concessions about how of course things weren’t all good. The book has almost no interest in the lives of the lower classes, and barely seems to realize this. It starts to really, really grate, especially when you’re making all these implicit judgments about how the Medieval era was compared to what came after – in which case, the lives of, like, 90% of the population are rather important! Like unironically peasant life is fascinating! What did life actually look like of the overwhelmingly majority of people? If you want to give a sketch of the entire era, it’s kind of important.

I’m almost certainly being unfair here – basically everything about the book’s sensibilities grated on me, so I can’t say I was trying to be especially charitable. But really – the book’s perfectly fine light reading, but as intentional propaganda is hamfisted and it’s unclear who it’s for, and as an actual history it’s just...bad. It’s useful as a way to get a sense of the discourse, I guess, but otherwise I couldn’t really recommend it.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great overview of current mainstream views on the (chiefly European) Middle Ages. There is a great distance between how the general public sees the period, usually still called the Dark ages, and what modern scholars think about it. I read it as a part of buddy reads for February 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The book is a broad general overview of the period. For the people, who are interested in medieval studies there is not a lot of new stuff, but for a wider public, it is a great introductory book. Its definite advantage, that is it just “flashes” fascinating events or persons, so that a reader may seek more about them instead of forcing own historical narrative.

Like a lot of works, it starts with debunking ‘Fall of Rome’ narrative, set by the Enlightenment scholars and shows that there were continuous links to Roman past, from (often fake) genealogy of new nobles to the fact that Constantinople was seen by many as a new Rome.

Then the author moves to raise of Islam and unification of Arabs, and the city of Jerusalem, a holy place for three religions and the fact that while past historians stressed on conflicts, there was a lot of cooperation. This piece surprised me:
IN THE EARLY 1180S, A SYRIAN nobleman wrote a book. More a series of anecdotes than a sustained narrative, the Book of Contemplation by Usama ibn Munqidh portrays a world in which he had only known a Christian Jerusalem (the city was taken when he was four years old). In this world, he both fights against some Franks and counts others as his friends. He recounts one incident, during a visit to Jerusalem, when he prayed at a small mosque adjoining Al-Aqsa on the Temple Mount. Facing south toward Mecca, he was accosted by a Frank who had just arrived in Jerusalem. The Christian Frank, interestingly, didn’t object to this Muslim praying but rather tried to tell the Syrian he was facing in the wrong direction—Christian churches are oriented east–west, with the altar to the east. That’s the direction in which the Christian thought Usama should be facing. Usama was taken aback, flabbergasted. But he was quickly rescued by his friends, who escorted the Frank out, apologized for his behavior, and stood guard so that Usama ibn Munqidh could complete his prayers.

It was, of course, fortunate that Usama’s friends were nearby but it’s also not surprising. Al-Aqsa Mosque, known as the “Temple of Solomon” to the Christians, was where the Knights of the Temple—the Templars—called home. Here, an Islamic Syrian nobleman, who throughout his career fought and killed Christian Franks, was, in this case, worshipping in a mosque in a Christian Jerusalem, when he was protected by a Christian religious-military order—a collection of knights vowed to holy war against the enemies of Christ.

There are a lot more, from a present of a glorious African elephant to Charlemagne in 802 to Northmen, who not only pillaged and raided, but founded states, from Rus to Sicily, visited North America and loved democracy and literature… where status of women was surprisingly high (compared to later times) and were trade was as important as military adventures.

Overall, a very well-written introductory text, but if you’re already well versed in the period there is not many new discoveries.

[David Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of vignettes set over the roughly 900 years from 430 to 1321 CE, all aimed to refute the popular idea that the end of "antiquity" was followed by the "Dark Ages" in which people were mired in ignorance and poverty until the Renaissance restored light and learning. Gabriele and Perry highlight a range of interesting (though not always admirable) characters and events from the period they dub "The Bright Ages," an effective rebuke to anyone who buys into the most reductive idea of the "Dark Ages." Casual readers will come away with a more nuanced view of the medieval period, and probably a more positive one.

A more informed reader might have a different experience. To list one example I'm familiar with, the book doesn't really engage at depth with some of the more recent scholarly debate about — the "fall of Rome," where contemporary scholars arguing that Rome fell have much more sophisticated and less moralizing arguments than the conventional understanding of the "Dark Ages" that Gabriele and Perry are focused on rebuking. That's fine, and readers who are familiar with the historical Middle Ages will still find plenty to ponder in this book, but as a member of this class I half-wished for a more deeply argued thesis as I read it, even as what was there gave me plenty to think about.

[Bruce Holsinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A lively, searing, and transformative reimagining of the medieval world, The Bright Ages is brilliant in every way, both lucid in its arguments and sparkling in its prose. A gripping and compulsive read."
[my endorsement for the publisher]

[K.J. Charles]

reminder to goldfish future self to pass

[Sara Raftery · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just terrible. I could barely get through it. This is a very confused book whose use of Twitter jokes already feels horribly dated, and it's only been in print two months.

The book's biggest problem is that it doesn't know who its audience is. The tone and marketing position it as pop history, but it's immediately clear that the book is in dialogue with a variety of academic disputes and popular misunderstandings of medieval history, and it assumes the reader is familiar with all of them. I was familiar with almost none of them, which made many chapters feel like the half of a cell phone conversation you overhear on the bus. The authors seem to want to refute every popular misconception about medieval history without the distasteful need to describe other people's bad ideas. There's also a clear need on the part of the authors to position themselves as Guys With Good Politics, which serves to distance us from the source material instead of bringing us closer to people who lived in a world almost totally alien to ours.

At the same time, the whole book is weirdly superficial. Each chapter covers a different location and a different era, hopping around Europe chronologically in both space and time, and thereby reducing every topic to a series of anecdotes. There are lots of assertions made but very little evidence presented beyond the endless anecdote parade. I am entirely prepared to believe people engaged in cultural exchange and women wielded power during the Middle Ages, but the book seems to expect me to need to be convinced. Repeatedly. With anecdotes.

And God, the writing. There aren't a lot of Twitter jokes and pop references, but every one made me deeply consider mulching the book. They feel like Extremely Online elbow pokes, a nod from one Cool Kid to another. It's distasteful and cringeworthy - to say nothing of the authors' insistence on coining the term the Bright Ages and using it over and over without ever actually making a solid argument for why they should. It's the same as their replacement of anecdote for argument, reduced to the level of terminology.

I really wanted to like this book. I'm beginning on a pre-Columbian world history reading project and I'd love to learn more about the European Middle Ages from the perspective of scientific advancement and cultural exchange. Instead I got anecdotes and weird combativeness (since I'm not a historian and don't know who they're fighting). I strongly don't recommend this.

[Tamara]

Oddly unpersuasive

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook.

For decades I have occasionally come across the concept that the Dark Ages were not so dark, that Constantinople was the New Rome, that women indeed were participatory or claimed agency. Yet no book I have read has put these and other ideas together. To better understand what the historian Matthew Gabriele is saying, I will have to read the print bookas soon as becomes available in the venues I use to read books.

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very light on quotations and other source material, and conversely heavy on lyrical editorializing that tends to repeat information given at the beginning of each chapter. I found myself skimming these sections. For deeper, more convincing arguments about the sophistication of medieval scholarship and culture, I would recommend The Light Ages by Seb Falk and The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller. As other reviewers have noted, ultimately the thesis of a tolerant, multicultural middle ages would be better supported by supplying plentiful evidence rather than what the authors do, which amounts to downplaying or dismissing widespread brutality and inequality. The stated goal is to counter the Right-Wing fantasy of a rigidly hierarchical past that glorifies righteous violence over the lower orders, but the authors succumb to painting a parallel fantasy of comfortable coexistence in which class conflict is avoided through the occasional concession of power to individual women or non-Christians. I suspect this is simply the other side of the same counterfeit coin.

[Susan in NC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable look at a period the authors readily admit is popularly portrayed as dirty, violent, riddled with dragons, death and disease.

I find nonfiction books difficult to review, as I am not an expert, and can only comment on whether I enjoy the writing style, the illustrations, or whether I learn something new.

In this case, I did enjoy the writing, found the illustrations of the ebook beautiful, and learned a lot that was new. The authors went off down several “rabbit holes” of names, dates, and events to illustrate their oft-stated premise that the period was human, messy and complex. I enjoyed the emphasis throughout on the themes of brightness, light, and fire - whether the sunlight coming through colored glass in a cathedral, bathing the sacred space in light, or the fires used to besiege a city, or to burn books.

As an amateur history buff, I’ve read a lot of fiction and nonfiction about the period, knew it was not black and white as is often portrayed, so a lot of this was familiar ground. However, I enjoyed learning more about the spread of Islam, and the expansion of the Mongol Empire. I will take advantage of the “Further Reading” provided to continue dipping my toe into these areas of history! I also appreciated how they framed the role of history and historians to remind us how complicated the past is, especially when some try to co-opt the past for their own ends, usually to gain or keep power.

We live, today, with the legacy of all this in our own dark age. White supremacists continue to reach back to medieval European history as a way to tell a story about whiteness, a sense of lost (but imagined) masculinity, and the need to shed blood… the particular darkness of the Dark Ages suggests emptiness, a blank, almost limitless space into which we can place our modern preoccupations, whether positive or negative.

page 250

I enjoyed this well-written popular history, listening to much of it, and would recommend it to those interested in the period.

[Catherine Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was fascinating, disappointing, confusing, not completely convincing, and not what I expected. I thought the book would set out to disprove the oft-expressed theory that nothing worthwhile was invented or written between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance by detailing such things as the great medical and scientific discoveries or the significant artwork, literature, law,and religious theories that occurred during the Middle Ages. While some of these works were mentioned, descriptions were not particularly detailed and the inventions and thoughts of the time took second place to a treatise on diversity. The latter was interesting in its own right as the authors put forth the proposition that the Roman Empire did not fall but that its point of centrality moved from Rome to Ravenna to Constantinople to central Europe and pointed out that people of different races, religions, and ethnicities coexisted and travelled freely across continents via trade routes just as they did in ancient Rome. But when forced to confront the fact that much of the diversity of both the ancient and modern Roman Empires was due to the enslavement and forced dislocation of conquered peoples, or that periods of seeming tranquility and peaceful coexistence were interspersed with religious/political wars, they fell back on the justification that "history is messy." Their point that the determination that the middle ages were "dark ages" was developed (and history rewritten) in later centuries to justify white superiority would play better if they had kept the discussion to the middle ages, which is what the book is about, and not veered into current politics. The inference is obvious, even without the lecture.