1195 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13:
978-0671548001
The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the
American writer, historian and philosopher Will Durant that focuses on a
philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the
general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 4:
The Age of Faith was originally published in 1950, and covers the Middle
Ages in both Europe and the Near East from the time of Constantine the Great to
that of Dante Alighieri. Naturally, squeezing a whole seven centuries into
1000+ pages would task even the most ardent of historians, but as should be
obvious by now, Will (and, it must said, Ariel) Durant were more than up for
the task; moreover, to actually make this history engrossing is an achievement
unto itself. All of the important military, religious, cultural and social
events that made the Medieval Age such a blast are all recorded here, along
with a plethora of mini-bios of the more important personages that did all of
the moving and shaking in the post-Roman world. They do so by drawing parallels
between the modern age (circa 1950, or so) and this long-lost world; thus, the
morals of the age, the beliefs of the inhabitants, the food that they ate…it’s
all here, made understandable and relatable to us ignorant moderns, even the
way they lived:
There was
not much comfort in the medieval home. Windows were few, and seldom glassed;
wooden shutters closed them against glare or cold. Heating was by one or more
fireplaces; drafts came in from a hundred cracks in the walls, and made
high-backed chairs a boon. In winter it was common to wear warm hats and fur
indoors. Furniture was scanty but well made. Chairs were few, and usually had
no backs; but sometimes they were elegantly carved, engraved with armorial
bearings, and inlaid with precious stones. Most seats were cut into the masonry
walls, or built upon chests in alcoves. Carpets were unusual before the
thirteenth century. Italy and Spain had them; and when Eleanor of Castile went
to England in 1254 as the bride of the future Edward I, her servants covered
the floor of her apartment at Westminster with carpets after the Spanish
custom—which then spread through England. Ordinary floors were strewn with
rushes or straw, making some houses so malodorous that the parish priest
refused to visit them.
It wasn’t all bleak, however, as the cultural flowering that would
see the West culturally reborn was already taking root in a variety of forms,
such as (especially?) in music, which after a long hibernation was reawakened
during this era:
We owe to
our medieval forebears still another invention that made modern music possible.
Tones could now be determined by dots placed on or in between the lines of the
staff, but these signs gave no hint as to how long the note was to be held.
Some system for measuring and denoting the duration of each note was
indispensable to development of contrapuntal music – the simultaneous and
harmonious procedure of two or more independent melodies. Perhaps some
knowledge had seeped from Spain of Arab treatises by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna,
and other Moslems who had dealt with measured music or mensural notation. At
some time in the eleventh century Franco of Cologne, a priest mathematician,
wrote a treatise Ars cantus mesurabilis, in which he gathered up the suggestion
of earlier theory and practice, and laid down essentially our present system
for indicating the duration of musical notes. A square-headed virga or rod,
formerly used as a neume, was chosen to represent a long note; another neume,
the punctum or point, was enlarged into a lozenge to represent a short note;
these signs were in time altered; tails were added; by trial and error, through
a hundred absurdities, our simple mensural notation was evolved.
While this book is the fourth part of an (ultimately) eleven-part
series, if one is new to the history of the Middle Ages you could do worse than
by starting with The Age of Faith and all that it holds. One is taken on
a grand tour, as it were, from the fall of Rome to the rise of Byzantium, the
survival of the Jews and the coming of Islam, before circling back to the West
and how this much-ravaged continent survived from around 600 to 1300, all in an
easy to understand fashion and with lucid prose. But be warned, for if you
haven't figured it out by now, The Story of Civilization is a history of
Western Civilization, and so if that pisses you off…well, tough. I mean,
it was published in 1950, but all the same, the West had just come out of some
of its darkest days, what with the Nazis having brought a degree of barbarism
to Europe that no barbarian could even dream of, so seeing this Western bias
through that particular lens darkly actually makes this work even more of an
achievement, as Durant (it would appear to me) sought to reclaim the mantle of
Western Civ from the bloody hands of the recent past.
All this is helped by what can only be described as superb writing.
Will and Ariel (I have no idea where the writing and research of one began and
the other ended) obviously had developed a close working relationship in which
they could together write with precision and grace. Add to this the fact that,
what with so few records and resources to go with at the time, they manage to
bring some 1000+ years of history from a diverse array of nations makes their
achievement even more remarkable. Can’t wait to review Volume 5.
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