Medieval Europe
Metadata
- Author: Chris Wickham
- ASIN: B01LZ01AC8
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B01LZ01AC8
- Kindle link
Highlights
History is not teleological: that is to say, historical development does not go to; it goes from. — location: 242
The fall of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century, the crisis of the eastern empire when it confronted the rise of Islam in the seventh, the forcefulness of the Carolingian experiment in very large-scale moralised government in the late eighth and ninth, the expansion of Christianity in northern and eastern Europe in (especially) the tenth, the radical decentralisation of political power in the west in the eleventh, the demographic and economic expansion of the tenth to thirteenth, the reconstruction of political and religious power in the west in the twelfth and thirteenth, the eclipse of Byzantium in the same period, the Black Death and the development of state structures in the fourteenth, and the emergence of a wider popular engagement with the public sphere in the late fourteenth and fifteenth: — location: 247
King John of England (1199–1216)* travelled an average of 20km a day, seldom staying anywhere more than a few nights. — location: 393
The self-servingness of much medieval religious rhetoric, particularly when it was the work of the powerful, can often be only too obvious to us; but it was not hypocritical. — location: 665
he’s so good at this
The best textbook, for me (it is in fact more than a textbook), is B. Rosenwein, A short history of the middle ages (2009). Other key interpretative works include G. Tabacco and G.G. Merlo, Medioevo (1981); J.H. Arnold, What is medieval history? (2008); and two better-than-average collective volumes, Storia medievale (1998), and C. Lansing and E.D. English, A companion to the medieval world (2009). For shorter periods, M. Innes, Introduction to early medieval western Europe, 300–900 (2007) and J.M.H. Smith, Europe after Rome (2005) for the early middle ages; R. Bartlett, The making of Europe (1993) and M. Barber, The two cities (2004) for the central period; J. Watts, The making of polities (2009) for the late middle ages. C. Wickham, The inheritance of Rome (2009) also covers the first half of the middle ages, in rather more detail than I do here. This fits with the fact that the second half of the medieval period makes up more than 60 per cent of this book; for more on the early middle ages, see Wickham, The inheritance. — location: 5540
10.J.E. Kanter, ‘Peripatetic and sedentary kingship’ (2011), 12–15. — location: 5566