The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Vol. 1, 350–950 ed. by Robert Fossier (review)

REVIEWS ofthe human heart, to the contemporary "Chaucer the social critic." This material should be particularly valuable to casual or novice students still caught in banal notions of"relevance" and "timelessness." Its presentation alone is worth the price of the book; it will certainly find its way to my undergraduate reserve list and into my course. MARY CARRUTHERS New York University ROBERT FOSSIER, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Vol. 1, 350-950. Trans. Janet Sondheimer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xxiii, 556. $49.50. Perhaps the best way to approach this large and comprehensive volume is simply to explain to the hypothetical readers-the students or scholars of the "Age of Chaucer"-what they are getting. This volume surveys in eleven chapters ofroughly the same length the early Middle Ages, begin­ ning with the end ofthe fourth century and ending with the middle ofthe tenth. Less obvious but more telling than this chronological sweep, there is what might be called a geographic sweep. The work begins in the Latin West, then after two chapters moves to the Byzantine East, then to the Arab East, then back to Byzantium, finally ending in the West again with the Carolingian renewal and its aftermath. The virtue ofthis cyclical organiza­ tion is that greater coverage is given to Byzantium and to Islam than is usually the case in one-volume histories, and that is surely to the good. Otheraspects ofthe workare less easy tosummarize. Although the sweep ofchronology and geography suggests an overarching sense ofunity to the work, it is in fact somewhat less unified than might appear at first glance. For one thing, each ofthe three areas is written by a different author (or, in the chapters on Islam, coauthors). Ifone adds the introduction, written by the editor, there are five authors. It is as accurate to describe the work as a series ofseparate essays as to describe it as a continuous narrative. Some­ times, as, for example, in the switch from Islam back to Byzantium in chapter 7, more of a transition is clearly needed. The chapter begins as though none ofthe previous discussion oflslam had taken place, as though its author were not even aware ofthe intervening chapters. Even more than such an obvious kind of disjunction, the separate authorship inevitably 197 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER points to larger questions about unity that go to the heart of the work: not a unified narrative on the one hand, but clearly something other than a reference work on the other; not a coffee table book, despite its lavish illustrations-many of them full-page color plates-but not a textbook either, at least in my reading. Is it a book that one might profitably read from beginning to end, or is it a book that one would go to to find out about a specific movement, battle, figure, or event? I find no easy or even satisfactory answer to this question. That is not to say that there is not an enormous amount of important information packed into the volume. As someone whose scholarly roots are almost entirely in the West, I found the material on Islam the most interesting part of the volume, but there weremany suggestive interpretive forays throughout the volume, especially with respect to the end of the Empire in the West, in what is usually called the transitionfrom ancient to medieval. And if the work tends to emphasize social, economic, and military history, there is also an attempt to include intellectual, religious, and artistic history as well. Even when all due praise is given to the enterprise, however, it seems to me to be a work in search ofan identity. The fact that the title includes the word "Illustrated" is yet another signal of this identity crisis: the full-color plates are almost entirely 'decorative; that is, they are not integrated into the text in any serious way. The black-and­ white illustrations are more integral, containing as they do some descriptive material in the legends and placed so that they can be used as a gloss to the text (although the maps could also have been more closely correlated to...