2010/10/01 by Michael Kulikowski · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Archaeological Studies #Medieval Literature and History #Historical and Religious Studies of Rome #Barbarian #Middle Ages #History #Classics #Roman Empire #Ancient history #Empire
paper · doi:10.1086/ahr.115.4.1201
openalex publication_date 2010/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
One would not have thought another general history of the later Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages was needed given that, in the past five years alone, we have had books from Bryan Ward-Perkins, Julia Smith, Chris Wickham, Adrian Goldsworthy, Christopher Kelly, J. J. O'Donnell, and several iterations of Peter Heather. Edward James, author of a very good history of early medieval Britain and two of the best books on the Franks, has added this book to a very crowded field. Perhaps surprisingly, the exercise has been worth it: he covers this familiar ground as sure-footedly as does Guy Halsall in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (2007), and he does so in half the space. At one level this is a very traditional medievalist's book: it cares not about the non-Roman world of late antiquity per se, but about the western and northwestern barbarian world that formed the core of medieval Europe. By ignoring North Africa, most of the Balkans and the European steppe, and the Armenian and Arabian hinterlands of the Persian and Roman empires, it implicitly affirms the teleology with which medievalists approach this period: although barbarians were everywhere part and parcel of a Roman world that stretched around the whole Mediterranean and beyond, the barbarians who really count for the future are the ones who laid the foundations for European nation-states. Within this fundamental ideological constraint, however, James's book is a model of its kind which can easily take its place on any medieval studies syllabus.