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\nTo 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<\/cite> 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<\/cite> is, as the subtitle makes clear, A New Cultural History<\/cite> of the period between 500 and 1000 CE, between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the start of the “true” Middle Ages.\n<\/p>\n \nTraditionally 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<\/cite> 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nEurope after Rome
\nJulia M. H. Smith
\n384 pages including index
\npublished in 2005
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