“The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000”, by Chris Wickham

 

688 pages, Viking Adult, ISBN-13: 978-0670020980

Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 is, in fact the second volume of the Penguin History of Europe, but I didn’t know that when I bought it, so…yeah, anyway: this is, officially, a book of popular history, written with the general public in mind and not a lot of professional historians…not that you would know it, however, what with the way in which it is written – which is poorly, filled as it is with convoluted sentence structures that achieve no artful results. I suppose I should not have been surprised at this, seeing as one of the blurbs on the back called Wickham’s “a pointillist narrative style” (this is in reference to Pointillism, a painting technique in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. Oh). So from that, I gather that Inheritance was meant to have been built up out of needlessly tangled sentences that are endless variations of “A invaded B”; “C executed D”; “E traded with F”; and so on…one is rather reminded of all of those Biblical “begats”, except that it just keeps going past A, B, C, D, E and F and ends up being “AAAC invaded BB2E, while CAE executed DFE3…” Confusing? Oh, yeah.

More distressing, from the standpoint of a supposed popular history, is that Wickham writes assuming that you already have a clear sense of the main events of the Late Roman/Early Medieval period; if you don’t, then this book won’t help you – in fact, it may hinder your studies because so much of it appears so disjointed and out of joint. There is a narrative of sorts embedded within this work, but it is hedged about by so many anecdotal asides and arcane references that it is virtually invisible to the uninitiated. For instance, try ploughing through this representative piece of illumination from page 45 (*ahem*): “This at least fits the Alemans of the 350s-370s described by Ammianus, whose seven kings (reges) united under Chnodomar and his nephew Serapio to fight Julian in 357, but the latter were also flanked by ten lesser leaders, regales, and aristocrats as well, ‘from various nationes’”. Hmmmmm…yeah, that Chnodomar was something, wasn’t he? C’mon, man; if this is Wickham’s idea of a “political narrative” he needs to get his head out of the darkness of his 4^th Century sources and return to the light of 21^st Century, STAT.

Chris Wickham is an historian of real consequence, seeing as he is emeritus Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, after being a Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Birmingham, but he has a surprisingly hard time making himself understood in print. I dunno…maybe his lectures are better.