Such a feat might, some could say should, require a massive volume, but not in this case: Wickham executes his narrative of a millennium of history in scarcely more than 250 pages of highly readable, approachable prose. Wickham conducts readers from the beginning to the very end of the medieval period, even going past its commonly-agreed end to discuss some implications for the early modern period after 1500, as well. The unofficial subtitle of Medieval Europe, emblazoned across the cover of my edition, reads “From the Breakup of the Western Roman Empire to the Reformation,” and this is no exaggeration.
That work, Medieval Europe, has certainly confirmed Wickham’s place in my stable of go-to scholars, and yet perhaps inevitably could not live up to the heights of its successor. I was so taken with Wickham’s scholarship of the first six hundred years of the Middle Ages that I immediately sought out his previous work, a history of the entire period. In the early months of 2021, I had the distinct pleasure of reading Chris Wickham’s magnificent Inheritance of Rome (reviewed here on Concerning History ).
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
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