Reviews

The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern

thevenerableread's review

4.0

A great classic, written with a beautiful literary sense and a thoughtful approach that explains historical change without resorting to narratives of progress or cultural superiority. It's chiefly an intellectual history (to my surprise): even its chapters on the organization of society, conceptions of geography, and church history come back to the history of ideas and how those ideas shaped cultural categories. In that sense, I wonder if you could place Southern within (or at least in dialogue with) the Annales school, contrary to our expectations of British historians of the time. The book does an exceptional job of making the various moments and geographies it contains feel like one world, in illustrating a vision of our history that is endlessly complex, but coherent and profoundly interconnected. It is one of the great joys of good history writing to see "the forest amongst the trees" and The Making does that superbly. Southern's primary tool in this regard is a limited cast of characters and places, which he treats in case studies and which he regards as emblematic of the major themes and attitudes of his period. Characters are routinely pop up and disappear in his narrative, only to return at an astonishing time later, sometimes in a completely different chapter. The strength of this method is the minimization of information overload. Its weakness: whose "making" of the Middle Ages is this? For the most part, Southern's Middle Ages seem to belong to the Angevins and to a select few scholars of northern France and England--Gerbert, Anselm, Peter of Blois. Even Italians and Germans are neglected in the narrative, not too mention the countries and people who are marginalized in the field already in Eastern and Southern Europe. I always felt like the coherence of the book was diminished by the last chapter, "From Epic to Romance," which perhaps tried too hard to pin the differences between the eleventh and twelfth centuries down to differing attitudes towards "movement" and which I felt delved too deep into the intricacies of Anselm and Bernard's theologies as definitive of the period. These discussions certainly could have belonged with his treatment of monasticism or the tradition of thought.

At times, the book could provide astonishing little gems of thought beyond their merit as good history. My favorite: "Satire is an unwilling tribute to power." How wonderful!