Chris Wickham's "The Inheritance of Rome: Shedding Light on the Dark Ages 400-1000"

Rhys D. Schneider: Quality book as advertised, well packaged. Appreciated!

United States on Nov 18, 2023

Hugh Chisholm: Service was excellent and the book is outstanding

Canada on Jun 10, 2023

S. Silvestre: This book is a dense and comprehensive review of the history of medieval Europe, starting from the transition from the Roman Empire to the medieval era. It is a very good book.

Netherlands on Oct 03, 2022

Cliente Amazon: Wickham apresenta um olhar maduro para a Idade Média, revelando tensões e uma estrutura complexa que vai além de uma história plana e hegemônica. Ao problematizar pequenas estruturas e outros grupos sociais Wickham dá mais densidade a compreensão política e econômica medievais.

Brazil on Sep 20, 2018

Cliente Amazon: Not easy to read, the book offers an excellent summary and updated analysis of some of the most o scure centuries of Europe's history. Probably the best study on the period.

Italy on Mar 20, 2018

Don Calavera: El libro cubre el periodo entre la caída del Imperio Romano de Occidente y el inicio de la baja Edad Media, es un ensayo excelente aunque quizá la prosa no es la mejor si no tienen ciertos conocimientos previos sobre el periodo.

Mexico on Feb 01, 2016

Greg Polansky: First of all, let's start with the title. The Dark Ages are an outdated term for a period that was anything but dark. The title used in England of this book, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, is a better guide to what you will be getting in this book. Even then, that too is misleading since areas like North Africa and what is now Iraq get coverage. Chris Wickham details the history of both the lands that Rome held sway over and lands at the periphery of the Roman Empire. For anyone always annoyed by the incorrect factoid that the Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, this will be good news.

Wickham does an excellent job of recounting the transformation of the Western Roman Empire, an area urbanized where the public sphere was important, into the subsequent kingdoms that were highly militarized, and where the public sphere had atrophied because cities were no longer possible to maintain in the first part of the period. Thus we get excellent histories of Vandal Africa, Visigothic Spain, Burgundy, Ostrogothic then Lombard Italy, Merovingian Francia, and later on of both the Carolignian Empire and the Caliphate that took over most of Iberia. Wickham details...

United States on Nov 17, 2013

David Hoffman: The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham is the second book in the series the Penguin History of Europe, following The Birth of Classical Europe. Like the earlier book, The Inheritance of Rome is more concerned with the uses the people of the era made of their understanding of the past than with giving a straightforward chronology of the era. In other words, this book deals with the inheritance the Roman Empire bequeathed to the peoples living in the centuries after its collapse in the West. These peoples, whether of the post Roman kingdoms of Western Europe, the Roman remnant of the Byzantine Empire in the East, or the Islamic invaders made differing uses of the institutions and cultural norms left behind by the Romans, each society adapting Roman ways to their particular needs.
The Inheritance of Rome covers the centuries between 400 and 1000. While these endpoints may seem somewhat arbitrary, in neither case do they indicate any sort of sharp division, they nevertheless are appropriate as the endpoints for the transformation of Europe from a continent dominated by a centralized empire to the decentralized, feudal Europe of the Central Middle Ages. At the beginning of this...

United States on Jan 09, 2013