496 pages,
PublicAffairs, ISBN-13: 978-1610393683
Paul
Collins seems to be a congenial enough writer, but with a strong bias against everything
that isn’t Catholic; perhaps this is because when he began writing The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany,
France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century, it was originally
intended to be a history of the papacy during the same timeframe as this book.
So there’s that. It’s an interesting thesis and decently written, as the author
stated that he saw a need for a history of this era utilizing metanarratives –
and before you can say Huh?!: metanarratives
are narratives about narratives: of
historical meaning, experience or knowledge, and which offer a particular
culture or society the promise of legitimizing itself with the completion of a Big
Deal (this is a thing in critical theory and postmodernism. Naturally). So The Birth of the West, then, is a modern-day
attempt to explain and legitimize the way in which Europe came to be – not
Europe the place, mind you, but Europe the idea and all that it’s supposed to
entail. And in less than 500 pages, to boot.
How
does he do, then? Well I tell ya: with the continental game of musical chairs
occurring during the 9th and 10th Centuries, a book with
427 pages of text is at best an outline; not a bad outline, but an outline
nonetheless. Collins weaves together a whole slew of narratives and problems
from across Europe during this epoch, covering the civil upheavals in Rome, the
Saracen incursions into southern Italy and France, the Magyar invasions and the
collapse of central authority with the disintegration of the Carolingian empire.
He then effectively narrates the rise of the Holy Roman Empire under the
Ottonians so as to create something approaching political stability in central
Europe. Collins’ writing style is well-suited to a popular history book, although
he perhaps unwittingly describes it very well when he in fact complains about
the style of a certain “naive young monk”: “Abbo seems to strain to impress us
with his knowledge of arcane Greek and Latin words and phrases...all of which
he hopes may find favor with his reader”. Right back atcha, Paul.
I
know a bit of medieval history, and yet I kept reading this book because it
presents a lively and engaging narrative of the age. It delves into
personalities and quirky events – like the trial of Formosus (look it up) – in
ways that other histories of the period underplay or cast to the sidelines. It
gives prominence to the struggles over the control of the papacy that other
works underplay (not surprising, as Collins has written extensively on the
history of that office). We learn about powerful women and influential
background characters, whether nobles, bishops, Viking lords, abbots or monks. And
in the end I’m fascinated with Collins’ thesis that the rise of the Ottonians
constitutes the Birth of the West; that is, the world as we know it (and see
disappearing, bit by bit). Furthermore, it was the drive of two remarkable men
– Pope Sylvester II (946 – 1003, born Gerbert of Aurillac) and the Holy Roman
Emperor Otto III (980 – 1002) that did so much to lead this chaotic continent
into the new millennium.
I,
for one, normally tend to suspect these kind of all-encompassing claims – How
Ireland save the World, How the Scots Invented Everything, etc. – but I think the
author may be on to something here. It’s probably in the Ottonian age that the
West recovered something of the late Roman balance of secular and sacred, with
tolerance for outliers like Celts and Goths and Neoplatonists and whatnot. As
Collins himself states, it was in the Tenth Century that Europe was born, and
it was Christianity that was the midwife. He also states explicitly that he
doesn’t want to live in a “global, secularist, multicultural, post-Christian
society” (he’s not the only one), and that even if that is where we are headed,
“[i]f we forget where we came from, we will simply drift into the future with
nothing to offer it”. Truer words were never spoken.
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