The Early Middle Ages
Rosamond McKitterick
308 pages including index
published in 2001
I spotted this book at the local library and got it out because it contained a contribution by Chris Wickham, whose Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Inheritance of Rome impressed me quite a lot when I read them earlier this year. The Early Middle Ages is one of the entries in The Short Oxford History of Europe and intended as an introduction to this particular period, what the editor Rosamond McKitterick called "the Boeing 767 view of early medieval Europe", quite a different sort of book from the two Wickham books. I therefore didn't expect to learn much news from this, but rather wanted to read it as an introduction to the other historians involved, none of whom I'd read before.
The Early Middle Ages attempts to give a broad overview of the evolution of Medieval Europe between 400 CE and 1000 CE and tries to evaluate this period on its own terms, rather than as a transition period between the Roman Empire and the "real" Middle Ages. Doing this in less than 250 pages, or some 80,000 words is a real challenge and of course means that a lot of history is elided. Ironically, if you are already familiar with the period, it helps a lot to understand some of the developments that are sketched out here, at least to put them into a chronological context. I'm not sure how much I would've understood of some the chapters had I come to this book as a complete novice. This feeling was the strongest in Chris Wickham's chapter, which felt as an extract of his two books mentioned above...
The focus of The Early Middle Ages is clearly on western Europe, concentrating on France, Italy and England -- the old European heartlands of the western Roman Empire-- with less attention paid to e.g. Germany or Spain . At the same time however some consideration is given by the individual authors to put developments there in context, comparing and contrasting with Scandinavia or the Byzantine Empire when appropriate. This is a sociological-economic history, so each chapter looks at one aspect of the Early Medieval world. The table of contents is as follows:
Obviously there's some overlap between chapters. The supplementary material (chronology, maps) helps somewhat to orientate readers new to the period. In general, this is a reasonable if flawed introduction to a fascinating period of history, which gives you some of the flavour of it, but does not quite succeed in building up a coherent picture.