History

Early Medieval Settlements — Helena Hamerow

History
Published on

Cover of Early Medieval Settlements


Early Medieval Settlements
Helena Hamerow
225 pages including index
published in 2002

I wasn’t quite sure whether I should get this book — complete title: Early Medieval Settlements – The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900 from the library. It looked as if much of what it covered I had already read about in Chris Wickham’s books Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Inheritance of Rome, only concentrating on the archaeological side of things rather than the history, which I’m more interested in. I also worried about whether it wouldn’t be too dry or technical, something I had problems with occasionally in the Wickham books. On the other hand, it was short, a quick scan didn’t make it look too boring and reading the introduction showed me it was meant as a general introduction to this subject, rather than an indepth analysis, all of which persuaded me into getting this.

The fact that I finished it means I made the right choice. Helena Hamerow writes well, knows her subject and also knows when to go into detail and when not to, making good use of footnotes. The end result is a good overview of the archaeology of everyday rural life around the North Sea coasts of the modern Netherlands, Germany and Denmark during the transition from Late Antiquity into the early Middle Ages and its relationship to the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England in the same period. Hamerow, as she explains in the first chapter, meant this book both as a general introduction to this period and area and as a pointer for her (monolingual) UK colleagues working on Anglo-Saxon England to the work done on the continent in the same period. Each chapter therefore ends with a quick overview of the relevant English archaeology.

As Hamerow argues, such a book was necessary because English archaeology lags behind the continent when it comes to this period, in general lacking the kind of large scale settlement excavations that have been done succesfully in Denmark, Holland and Germany for several decades now, giving archaeology on the continent a much larger evidence base to work with. Because of that larger evidence base it has been possible to make some generalisations about the way rural settlements evolved and developed in this period, though of course always with the necessary caveats and with no guarantee that new discoveries won’t upend some splendid theory. According to Hamerow this means that the work done on the continental side of the North Sea can be related to Anglo-Saxon discoveries in England, also because it is possible to –cautiously– speak of a similar cultural context in all these regions.

She sets this all up in the first chapter, introducing the differing archaeological approaches and frameworks used for this period, to provide the context for the more specialised chapters to follow, each of which treat one aspect of settlement archaeology. She starts with the most concrete and physical archaeological evidence, steadily opening out in scope. So we go from “Houses and Households: the Archaeology of Buildings” via “Settlement Structure and Social Space” to “Land and Power: Settlements in their Terrirorial Context”, ending with two chapters on “The Forces of Production: Crop and Animal Husbandry” and “Rural Centres, Trade and Non-Agrarian Production”. The final chapter is barely worth that name, just a couple of pages of summing up and generalising what we just read.

Each of these chapters is in itself an overview of a much bigger subject, of necessity barely scratching the surface. Each chapter therefore needs to build a balance between the general and the specific, providing specific examples of the subjects treated in it while also putting them in context, where possible. A difficult job, but one that Hamerow manages quite well. Throughout the book she tries to use the same excavations as examples where possible, each time treating a different aspect, which helps a lot in keeping things clear as there’s enough information to take in already in this slender book. Interesting enough for me as a Dutchman are the large number of Dutch examples she uses, especially from the province of Drenthe, where as it turns out much pionering settlement archaeology has been done.

Early Medieval Settlements was published in 2002 and as Hamerow admits, uses little information from after 1999, so no doubt some of the information and theories in here are outdated, but this does not diminish its achievements in providing a good, general overview of a difficult subject. I need to keep an eye out for more of Helena Hamerow’s work.

The Inheritance of Rome — Chris Wickham

History, Rome
Published on 2 Comments on The Inheritance of Rome — Chris Wickham

The Inheritance of Rome


The Inheritance of Rome 400-1000
Chris Wickham
651 pages including index
published in 2009

The way you learn about history as a kid, both in school and through pop culture is as discrete chunks. You got your prehistory, your Bronze Age, your Greeks and Romans, your Biblical Times if you’re in an Christian school, your Middle Ages and so on and so weiter. It’s comprehensible, makes history all very neat and tidy and of course completely wrong. This is not a new truth of course, but it was driven home for me once again by Chris Wickham in The Inheritance of Rome, which is all about showing the continuity the Early Middle Ages had with the Late Roman Empire, without being blind to the ways in which Europe evolved away from its Roman era roots during this period. There is no bright line you can draw that divides these two eras.

Nor is there a Dark Age. As Wickham puts it in his introduction, the centuries between the Fall of Rome and the Central Middle Ages, between 400 CE and 1000 CE, tend to fit it awkwardly with the traditionally whiggish view of history as one of inevitable progress leading from antiquity to modern times, where Classic Antiquity can be seen as a vanished Golden Age, with the Renaissance or Late Middle Ages as the starting point for that story of inevitable progress, the centuries inbetween banished to the awkward limbo of the Dark Ages. When these centuries were treated in traditional history it was because that’s when modern European nations like France or England got their first start. Neither view sits well with Wickham, who argues that these essentially teleogical views of this transitional period, judging them in the context of what came after them, give the wrong image. You have to look at this time on its own terms rather than trying to glean the beginnings of future developments in it.

Read More

The Goths – Peter Heather

History, Rome
Published on

Cover of The Goths


The Goths
Peter Heather
358 pages including index
published in 1996

Most of Peter Heather’s professional output has, in one way or another, featured the Goths. Usually this has been in the context of their contribution to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, which Heather has long argued they played a central role in. In The Goths his focus is slightly different, more concerned with the Goths themselves than with how they interacted with the Roman Empire, though that still of course is an important part of their story. The Goths is an entry in the Blackwell series The Peoples of Europe and is meant as a one volume overview of their entire history, for people largely unfamiliar with them. As Heather mentions in his introduction, the last book to attempt this was published in 1888, so it was high time for an update.

Heather’s divides his book in three main parts, preceded by an introductionary chapter. In this he discusses why the Goths were important and the problem of social identities, where the old assumptions of unchanging peoples recognisable by some checklist of unique features had been challenged in the 1950ties and 60ties by new research showing how individuals could change their identity when advantageous. Heather applies a synthesis of these approaches to the Goths, arguing that while there was such a thing as a Gothic group identity, it was fluid enough for non-Goths to join into and for the group as a whole to adapt to changing circumstances. He then goes on to first explore the origins of the Goths, thentheir invasion and defeat of the East Roman Empire and further wanderings through the Balkans into Italy and Gaul and finally looks at the history of the two Gothish kingdoms established on parts of the Western Empire. In all three parts Heather puts the search for Gothish identity central.

Read More

The Making of Late Antiquity – Peter Brown

History, Rome
Published on

Cover of The Making of Late Antiquity


The Making of Late Antiquity
Peter Brown
135 pages including index
published in 1978

Peter Brown is the historian who popularised the idea of Late Antiquity as a transitional period between classic antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with the emphasis on the continuity between Rome and the Middle Ages, rather than on the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Brown first publicised his theories in The World of Late Antiquity; this isn’t that book, but was the closest to it I could get. The Making of Late Antiquity is based on a series of lectures Brown gave at Harvard University in 1976 and focuses on the transformation of Roman society between the second and fourth centuries CE.

A topic which is of course closely connected to the political and economic turmoil which the Roman Empire was subjected to in that period, with civil wars, “barbarian” invasions and a resurgent Persia, but you wouldn’t know it from this book. Brown concentrates on the inner lives of the Romans and ignores politics. This alone makes it an odd bedfellow with the other histories I’ve reading about this period, but Brown’s writing style makes it even odder. His writing is very oldfashioned, almost nineteenth century like, sometimes hard to come to grips with. The combination of inner focus and his writing style made this book fussy and a bit prissy, at least to me.

That Brown’s focus is on the mental rather than the political transformation of the Roman Empire made for a bit of a change, a different way of looking at Late Antiquity. Personally I find this too contrived to be useful, leaving out too much context and providing a much too rosy view of the late Roman Empire. Despite this I still finished The Making of Late Antiquity, since it was short enough to not waste too much time on.

There are two main arguments being pushed here. The first is the transformation of urban politics, as Roman society in these centuries became more hierarchical and more ambitious. Brown argues that in the second century ambition had been dampened by channeling it into local causes, e.g. through the sponsorship of religious festivals or by financing new buildings. Two centuries later these governors limiting ambition no longer worked; instead political ambition was aimed at the emperor. Political power was no longer to be found locally, but through the imperial bureaucracy and ultimately the favour of the emperor itself. Local elites became smaller and more connected to the centre.

At the same time, there was of course the transformation of the empire from being pagan to a Christian one. This again could be seen as a change in ambition. Religion in the second century was much more of a private affair than it would be in the fourth. The numinous was widespread in both centuries, but in the second it was more capricious, the gods could strike anybody and there were no reliable connections to the supernatural. Even those who called themselves sorcerers were relatively modest in their claims, never claiming universality. By the fourth century this had changed, through the Christian tradition of saints as well as the establishment of bishops and the church hierarchy. This much more controlled channel towards God mirrored the way in which society as a whole became more hierarchical.

Peter Brown’s focus is on the how, not the why of these changes. There’s not much discussion of the root causes for how Roman society evolved in these centuries. In this you can perhaps see the origin of this book in a series of lectures, as a good discussion of these root causes would be difficult to do justice in that format. Their lack in the book made it less than satisfying to me, left out too much context.

The Wages of Destruction – Adam Tooze

History
Published on

Cover of The Wages of Destruction


The Wages of Destruction
Adam Tooze
800 pages including notes and index
published in 2006

When I read Hitler’s Empire back in August, I had actually wanted to read The Wages of Destruction, due to Alex Harrowell’s review when it came out. I couldn’t find it so Mark Mazower’s book was a more than acceptable substitute. Both books look at the economy of Nazi Germany and the empire it carved out, each in their own way. Whereas Mazower’s point of view is that of a historian turned economist, Tooze approached the subject from the other side: economicst first, historian second. And while Mazower primarily looked at the interaction and tensions between nazi ideology, economci reality and the demands of war, Tooze goes for the more fundamental question of how the fundamental constrains of the German economy influenced nazi decision making, argueing that seemingly irrational decisions made by Hitler and the nazi leadership, not the least the decision to invade Russia, made perfect sense when looking at the economic context.

Which is not to say, nor does Tooze, that Nazi ideology wasn’t not irrational or evil, but that if you take into account their worldview, that in this context their decisions were rational and clearheaded and clearly informed by the economic realities of Germany. To the Nazis, as to most intelligent observers between the wars, it was clear that Germany was doomed to be a second rate power, not big or rich enough to seriously challenge countries like England, with its vast colonial empire, let alone America or the USSR. Under the Weimar Republic, the best it could hope to achieve was to become a middling European power, growing rich on American coat tails. Nazism set out to change this, to conquer a larger living space for the German race by force and through pure willpower and technology transform the German economy into the equal or even the superior of the American. This struggle lies behind all strategic decisions the Nazi leadership made in the runup to the war and during it, each time putting their faith into another great leap forward, each time still finding themselves in the same box, in the end not having been able to overcome these fundamental limitations.

Read More