By: Roger Collins (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 533 pages. $65.00, cloth; $20.95, paper.)
| All of us who teach the long and difficult centuries of the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages should be glad to see Roger Collins’s textbook back in print, and how expanded and updated in a new edition. Collins sets himself a nearly impossible task, a wide ranging survey of seven centuries of European history from Constantine to Otto III, and accomplished it with liveliness and considerable grace. The first edition has always stood out for the range of its coverage; Byzantium and Rome are here in equal measure, as well as the fringes of the Mediterranean world, from the rise of Islam to Bulgaria to Ireland. The second edition builds on this ambitious approach with a new chapter on Spain in the wake of the Islamic conquest, and additional space is devoted to the still understudied tenth century in the west. Collins manages to make sense of all this widely varied material by setting himself a conservative (some might say old-fashioned) goal. He provides his readers with a continuous political account, wherein the details of reigns and modes of ruling are teased out of often difficult and opaque sources. Collins is at his best here. His is no distant and authoritative master narrative; instead, the sources lurk just below the surface on every page. Collins keeps the discussion centered on the sources and the problems they present for would-be modern interpreters. This transparent approach to the raw materials of his history succeeds both as a methodological principle, and as a pedagogical lesson. Collins’s judgments about his sources are usually shrewd and well informed, and his generosity in sharing with his readers the process by which he came to form these judgments is rare in a textbook. Smart undergraduates will find their way back to the sources, and thus to first-rate essay topics, with ease from the footnotes. | 1 |
| It must be said, however, that the strengths of this approach come at a cost. The almost exclusively political focus backed by serious discussion of the sources does keep the narrative tight, but in the process there is little scope or room left over for the kind of religious and cultural history which has so flourished in the last thirty years, and which has made the field of late antique and early medieval studies so exciting and vibrant. Readers more used to traveling these roads through the works of Peter Brown and Janet Nelson may suffer some initial disorientation. The principal religious controversies and movements find their way into the text, but the coverage is slight and compartmentalized. Even where Collins feels most at home, in the examination of rule and the various mechanisms of royal power, his focus on kings and emperors can distort. His discussion, for example, of Carolingian government is lucid and thorough on the limits of Charlemagne’s power and the ultimate ineffectuality of so many contemporary royal initiatives. But to look only at Charlemagne’s administrative attempts and find them lacking misrepresents much of what we now know about the process and nature of rule and law in the Frankish kingdoms. So much recent and important work, probably best exemplified by the two volumes on dispute settlement edited by Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre, has moved the discussion of early medieval law out of the royal court and into the world of local magnates. As Collins keeps his focus on the kings, the aristocracy gets left behind. Early medieval kingdoms were more complex and decentralized than Collins allows, and students will have to proceed here with caution. | 2 |
| Still, the book should fit nicely into the first segment of upper division, multiple-term surveys of medieval history as taught at many larger American universities. What Collins sets out to accomplish, he accomplishes well. Shortfalls in cultural and religious history or the finer points of justice should easily be rectified in lecture or by additional shorter readings. As a stand-alone introduction to the period this book may prove perhaps too idiosyncratic, but as a strong foundation on which to build a course, Early Medieval Europe is without rival. | 3 |
| University of California, BerkeleySam Collins | |
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