Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Caesar Contra the Multi-Cultis

When Historians Contend
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3 comments:

My Frontier Thesis said...

I just watched Gladiator and I don't remember any of this in the movie!

12/19/2006 11:41 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

Michael McCormick (I think at Harvard) is supposed to be the one churning out a small battalion of Mediterranean history grad students, at least on the Ivy League level these days. On a more serious note, Marxist historian Chris Wickham published is hefty, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, (Oxford University Press, 2007). Note: get the paperback; it's only fifty bucks rather than $159 for the hardcover. There's a good review by Benjamin Schwarz in the September/2006 issue of The Atlantic. I don't think I'll get nicked for copyright if I just post the first two paragraphs, and provide the link:

"Framing the Early Middle Ages, by Chris Wickham (Oxford). Historical research incessantly accrues, but at certain times the study of a particular subject or era enters a period of unique originality and brilliance. The 1960s and 1970s proved to be a golden age for the study of both American slavery and British imperialism; the 1950s was such a time for scholarship on European intellectual history. Since the 1990s, the historical profession’s most spectacular achievement has probably been the study of late antiquity—the period in Europe and the Mediterranean world between A.D. 250 and 800, which saw the end of classical civilization as well as the triumph of Christianity and Islam.

The research has been both voluminous—the archaeological picture for some countries has grown a hundredfold—and transformative. Historians have profoundly altered their understanding of religious, cultural, intellectual, social, economic, and even military developments, and with it their understanding of, say, the fluidity between barbarian and classical societies, between Islam and Christendom, between paganism and Christianity, and between Eastern and Western Christendom. This historiographical explosion shows no sign of ending, perhaps because the dynamism of the subject fuels the dynamism of the research: ultimately, the scholars are attempting to fathom far-reaching historical change, and although it’s true that all of history is marked by flux and transition, this period is especially so. (One of the myriad fundamental questions historians are wrestling with, for instance, is the rather obvious but terrifically complex one of how societies in northern Europe absorbed a religion whose outlook had been shaped in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.)..."

12/19/2006 11:51 PM
Tecumseh said...

In her view it is only the political rhetoric of Renaissance Europe that labeled the period after the fall of the West "the Dark Ages." In our modern sensitive multiculturality, we don't use pejorative names. They weren't post-empire, in other words, they were differently-empired. Not uncivilized, but civilization-challenged.

This is precious. Oh man, oh man -- isn't poking fun at the multicultis like shooting fish in a barrell? No matter, they keep on coming, and piling up their non-sensical bilge, like the Energizer Bunny (am I mixing metaphors somewhere?) How come?

12/21/2006 9:19 PM

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