Articles with the Tag Late Antiquity

Europe after Rome — Julia M. H. Smith

History, Rome
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Europe after Rome
Julia M. H. Smith
384 pages including index
published in 2005

To be honest I only took this book out of the library because there was little else in the way of good history books that day. Europe after Rome was a bit of a safe choice, on a subject I’d already read a lot about and if perhaps it would offer little new knowledge, I knew I would at least enjoy the refresher. I had no high hopes for this book, but sometimes gambles pay off — this was one of these cases. Because Europe after Rome is, as the subtitle makes clear, A New Cultural History of the period between 500 and 1000 CE, between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the start of the “true” Middle Ages.

Traditionally historians have treated this period as a transitional one between this two high points of civilisation, as a story of collapse and rebound, when the seeds were laid for what would become the familiar nations of modern Europe: France, Germany, England. Europe after Rome abandons this teleological view deliberately in favour of an approach that follows three interpretative threads: the role of the Roman heritage in the formation of Early Medieval cultures/policies, the diversity of experience for these cultures — this is not a book about European culture, but about the cultures of Europe — and finally, the dynamism of these cultures, all changing a lot over this period, which Smith is careful never to imply as meaning that these were evolving towards a set goal. To help her with this approach, she takes care to look at a wide range of European experiences, both geographically by looking at a region that reaches from Spain to Scandinavia and from Italy to Hungary and by crosscutting between cultures within each chapter for her examples.

Before I go into the structure of Europe after Rome, I should point out another relatively unusual feature, the care with which Smith has made this a history of all the people who lived in the Early Middle Ages, women as well as men. It’s easy to slip into historical narratives that priviledge the male experience, if only because traditional histiography and contemporary sources both tend to this already. It takes effort to seek out and highlight female experiences as well and more so to incorperate them as naturally as Smith has done here. You almost need to have it pointed out to you to see how unusual this is.

Smith builds up her history from the bottom up, starting with the fundamentals: speaking and writing, living and dying, moving through affinies: friends and relations, men and women, to resources: labour and lordship, getting and giving and finally on to ideologies: kingship and Christianity, Rome and the peoples of Europe. The focus of Europe after Rome at first therefore lies squarely on the common people and their experiences, only slowly moving up the social scale to the kings and popes who are usually in the spotlights. Each chapter is divided into several subchapters, looking at specific aspects of the subject under discussion. So the chapter on friends and relatives looks at identity, friends by blood and honour and vengeance, while the chapter on labour and lordship in turn looks at servitude and freedom, peasants and lords and the search for status, each building logically on its predecessor.

In every aspect of Early Medieval life Smith examines, the influence of Christianity is clearly visible. What’s equally clear however is how diverse Christianity was in this period. Even apart from the differences between the “western” church of Rome and the “eastern” Byzantine church, there’s a lot of diversity in how people experienced Christianity. It quickly becomes obvious that much of what Christianity means to its followers was decided locally, often incorporating already existing traditions and rituals and sometimes based on no more than secondhand information about Christian beliefs. A far cry from the image I sort of had of an Europe ruled by Catholicism.

Though there is something of a broad chronological sweep in Europe after Rome, this is not a chronologically orientated history, so you do need to have some rough idea of what happened in the Early Middle Ages, of who the various players were, to get the most out of it. It is full of interesting little facts, asides and anecdotes, like the one about Boniface of Canossa on his way to pick up his bride, who shod his horse with silver shoes, deliberately made easy to lose so “people may know who he was”. Such a story is not just interesting in itself, it’s also a good illustration of, in this case, the important role gift giving and shows of generosity played in establishing a noble man’s power and worth.

So yeah, a good addition to all the other books about Late Antiquity/the Early Middle Ages and highly recommended to anybody. Sometimes a gamble pays out very well indeed…

The Goths – Peter Heather

History, Rome
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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.

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The Making of Late Antiquity – Peter Brown

History, Rome
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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.