Why read Framing the Early Middle Ages?

Book cover of Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800

Book description

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Framing the Early Middle Ages as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Patrick J. Geary

Author

Rather than following a chronological order or a political narrative, Wickham, the leading British historian of the Early Middle Ages, takes a thematic and regional approach to the transformation of the Roman world across the Mediterranean.

His dense comparisons of the economic and social structures of specific regions, both some like Denmark and Ireland that were never part of the Roman Empire, as well as core regions around the entire Mediterranean, highlight the diversity already existing within the Roman Empire and the differing fates of these regions as they emerged from its disappearance.

From Patrick's list on the end of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.