The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies (review)

In 2007, the History Channel, perhaps the most influential outlet for popular history in the United States, aired The Dark Ages, a documentary on early-medieval Europe. The program's title served as a depressing reminder to professional medievalists of the wide gulf between popular and scholarly impressions of this period. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick have now published the proceedings of a 2004 conference held at Harvard University in 2004 as The Long Morning of Medieval Europein an attempt to demonstrate the sophistication of both early-medieval society and the diverse methodologies employed by scholars of the period. As Davis and McCormick declare in their introduction and as the individual contributions attest, the early Middle Ages was no Dark Age, even in the less objectionable sense of a period poorly represented in the historical record. Moreover, its glories were not simply the moldy remnants of a superior Roman past but also were true innovations. This thesis is ably and convincingly demonstrated by the individual essays, which are grouped under five topical rubrics: economy, religion, literature, politics, and art. Synergy between the contributions is provided by McCormick's introductory essays to each section, which lucidly place the individual essays within a common historiographical framework and provide linkage between the sections. Concluding essays for each section authored by other conference participants offer critical perspective on the papers. The quality of the individual essays is uniformly strong. Those that focus on historical methodology, for example, reveal medievalists' impressive new avenues of research. McCormick's essay surveys the information provided by biomolecular archaeology, including previously inaccessible data about human diet, the migration of peoples, and the spread of infectious diseases. Of particular interest to historians of religion, Guy Philappart and Michel Trigalet's contribution is a fascinating description of their ongoing database project that eventually will consist of 10,000 hagiographical works and 3320 saints, which aims to provide quantitative evidence about Christian sanctity between the third and fifteenth centuries. Other essays challenge conventional wisdom on a variety of disciplinary fronts. Joachim Henning, for example, argues that that a dynamic farmstead model of peasant society emerged in Western Europe following the disappearance of Roman authority, but was brought to a premature end by the emergent estate system of the Carolingian Empire, a change, he argues, that instigated economic stagnation. Similarly controversial, Riccardo Francovich challenges the traditional narrative of incastellamentoin Italy, employing archaeological evidence to argue that seventh- and eighth-century Tuscan peasant settlements were already nucleated and focused on hilltops, and that the appearance of aristocrats in these communities occurred later. Still other contributors investigate previously neglected corners of early-medieval culture, such as Paul Dutton's examination of blood rain as a "cultural and historical experience," Joaquín Martínez Pizarro's reading of the Historia Wambaas an exercise in political damage control, and Mayke de Jong's search for political symbolism in Charlemagne's solarium. Although the majority of contributions ably promote the editors' stated goal of demonstrating the dynamism of early-medievalist scholarship, as well as the blatant unsuitability of the epithet "Dark Age," it is doubtful that they will hold much appeal or meaning to a nonspecialist audience, despite the inclusion of McCormick's introductions. This is a shame, not only because of the impressive quality of this anthology and its individual components but also because of the desperate need for a scholarly work of popular appeal that can change public perceptions of this deeply misunderstood period. For such a work we must continue to wait.