Medieval Europe Reading Plan

Hi all,

I have been doing something over the last 4 months that I thought some members here might find interesting. I have been reading a medieval history textbook, and after certain chapters, I turned to a separate account of the events and themes covered in those chapters. The textbook I have been using is Western Europe in the Middle Ages: 300 - 1475 by Brian Tierney. After chapter 7, I stopped and read Charlemagne: a biography by Derek Wilson. After chapter 16, I read The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern. I just recently finished chapter 25, which brought me up to the early 15th century. I plan to read A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, and possibly The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga.

I have previously tried in vain to get a sense of this period of European history and failed because I did not have the proper context to tackle any given narrowly focused book. I also felt the general overviews I attempted were by themselves too superficial in their coverage. With this method, I feel like I have a working understanding of the big picture -- who was allied with whom and why, who the big thinkers were and what they thought about, the main cultural inclinations and disputes of the period, etc. -- and am better able to focus on a narrower scope.

I wonder now what members of this group think about this form of systematic reading. My goal was to break down an overwhelmingly complex subject into digestible parts. I think this method accomplishes this, and I plan to use it to read about other regions and eras. Anything you would do differently? Any suggestions for textbook/popular history couplings for other regions or periods?

Thanks!

Sounds like a great plan and much more organized than what I do 8-)

I think having any sort of a plan and being able to analyze and assess it is a plus when reading to increase knowledge, not just for entertainment.

What I did when I started out was read several overviews, then start working my way through books covering different regions in different times. My first book was Norman Canto's Civilization of the Middle Ages. I followed with Goetz', Life in the Middle Ages from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century, Rosener's Peasants in the Middle Ages, LeGoff's Medieval Civilization, a bunch of the Gies & Gies books, Hanawalt's The Ties That Bound, Herlihy's Medieval Households, etc., which I thought would be general overviews.

Next I began working my way from the 6th century through the 15th and covering various regions. All of this took me probably five years before I decided that Continental Europe from the 4th-9th centuries was what interested me the most and for the past 10 or so years I concentrated on this.

There are a bunch of different ways to go - having one you've thought about and can track puts you ahead of the curve.

Though while Huizanga was fantastic when it was written it's badly outdated now. And I'd only read Tuchman if you're interested in how mistaken a book can be when the author shows an over reliance on a single source which she chooses to use uncritically even though he (Froissart) has been shown to be quite unreliable as anything other than evidence of attitudes, values and beliefs - it certainly can't be used to determine the "what happened" parts of history. I should note that I've not read Tuchman but am relying on reviews. See: http://www.librarything.com/topic/53317#1072500 for a bit more.

At least, in contrast to William Manchester, it seems that Tuchman tried to get it right.

I have read that a lot, that so-and-so really gets this-or-that totally wrong. I have a hard time believing it. I don't know about Manchester, but B. Tuchman strikes me as a fairly conscientious writer who would take her time to make sure what she's writing generally reflects reality. She states in the preface to her book that she relies on chroniclers more than some other historians, but she has to due to her chosen narrative device (i.e., following around a particular noble). As a general reader, how concerned should I be that Tuchman or Huizinga get some things wrong? I am not an academic. I am doing all this for "fun," so I don't really need the author to be right about every detail. That said, I probably wouldn't read a book if you told me that 50% of the big picture items are just flat out made up. With respect to Tuchman, Huizinga, et al., I assume close to 100% of the big picture is right (there was a plague, a 100 years' war, a jacquerie, and someone by the name of Enguerrand VII), and maybe 85% of the details are correct. Is that not a fair assessment? Am I about to just completely waste my time?

I know of no historian who believes Tuchman is worth reading for historical value. She uncritically relied on a source who not only twisted things to suit him with some regularity but flatly made quite a few things up. OTOH, I know lots of people who say it's a good read and entertaining.

Tuchman's main fault was being a successful writer while female. The boy's club resented that an amateur stole their cake (as amateurs often do in the narrative history category, cf. Shelby Foote, John Julius Norwich, Jonathan Sumption, Desmond Seward, ...). The critics have trouble bringing up even nitpicks and hold her to a different impossible standard (just read other history books from the 1970s for comparison). It is not a scholarly monograph and never was intended to be. That said, Tuchman manages to elegantly, and in my view correctly, convey the era like no other.

If you (as a non-specialist) read just one late medieval narrative book, you could do not much better than with Tuchman. The one peculiarity, which I personally like about her books, is that they are implicit commentaries on other periods. The Distant Mirror on the catastrophic 20th century, The guns of August on the Cold War, Stilwell on Vietnam. In stark contrast to the Kagan/Goodwin/... school of history writing, Tuchman does not try to press the present into the past but unearths the past to develop themes relevant to the present day.

Tuchman is a good read for beginners because she writes entertainingly. When I read Distant Mirror, I didn't know enough about medieval French history(as opposed to Germanic languages and medieval Germanic literature) to be particularly bothered by her reliance on a single source if I had known about it. After all, I never studied medieval France until later, when I was working backwards from the Minnesinger 8-)

She cites about 100 primary sources, and 300 secondary sources. On what single source out of the 400 cited does she rely?

Hi Asabel, I think you've got a brilliant system going, I am very tempted to use it to do the history of ancient Rome, from founding to the end of the republic, something I keep meaning to learn more about and am very interested in but just don't know how or when to start, thanks for the idea :)

First, I heartily approve your plan. I've used something similar a number of times with excellent results. If others are thinking of doing a similar type of study, let me recommend the courses of the Teaching Company as a good starting point (assuming they have one that covers the area you want to study). Each course is a broad overview of it's topic, discussing major thought in the field and unresolved controversies. The course comes with a guide which has an outline of each lecture and the some additional reading the teacher recommends. At the end is a bibliography of other readings the professor recommends to get more in-depth on certain aspects of the course. While sometimes I've found the readings that go with the lectures to be not very inspiring (Sometimes it's just the professor's favorite text book), I've always found stuff in the bibliography that's been a good read for someone doing self study.

On Tuchman and how concerned one should be about accurate the books we read are: (Caveat: I only got about a quarter of the way through Tuchman before throwing it across the room.)

There are many ways history can be "inaccurate."

First, the facts can be wrong (or unsubstantiated at present): The pyramids were built by aliens. Umm, no. Books like these should be ignored in a serious study of a topic.

Second, the author can get the facts correct but leave out known information to backup a certain conclusion. This ranges from deliberate attempts to mislead, to books that deal with a broad sweep of events where certain things must be left out. The deliberate deception kind should be avoided. The broad sweep, which is where Tuchman fits in, is another matter. I think that Tuchman's view isn't wrong, it just leaves so much out that it makes many things that happened in the period incomprehensible. So, if Tuchman is all you read, you're not going to get a good grasp on what life was really like. Or worse, if you read Tuchman first and decide that's the be all and end all of the 14th century and dismiss everything else you read as wrong because it doesn't agree with Tuchman, you'll do yourself a serious disservice. However, there's no harm in reading Tuchman in the context of other books on the subject to see what she can contribute to the conversation.

I personally try to avoid outlier books when I'm embarking on a study project in case I get bogged down and that's all I have the time or energy to read. I'd rather have read a more standard source. However, I've often backed into a research project by starting with an outlier books and then wanting to delve further into why there's a controversy.

Aulsmith: Thank you for your thoughts on Tuchman. I'm on page 220 or so, so I think I am in it for the long haul. She writes incredibly well; her chapter on the black plague is among the finest pieces of historical writing I have ever read. I had tried to read Tuchman a few years back as an introduction to the medieval period, but I too had thrown the book across the room. She writes for almost too intelligent of a reader sometimes. For example, upon first reading it, I came across a completely mystifying expression, 'the Jacques', without any effort on her part to slow down and introduce this new terminology (unlike the Tierney textbook, which italicized it and defined it on the spot). She does eventually explain what a 'Jacques' is, but she does so 4 pages letter when it suits her. She also does not hesitate to jump between the broad narrative history of the period and side discussions about women, children, peasants, food, fashion, etc. All very interesting, and indeed the reason one reads a book such as this to begin with, but it certainly complicates the process of learning the traditional broad sweep chronological history of the period. I have noticed that she relies a lot on Froissart and other chroniclers, but she is usually pretty good about identifying any such reliances in the text itself, and I have found she uses chroniclers more for quick anecdotes than for actual "history." In at least some instances, she explains why she doubts the chronicler's account.

I agree I wouldn't read Tuchman as the first or primary book on the subject.

All, as an update to the above: I have read the following books (in the order in which I started reading them):

Western Europe in the Middle Ages by Brian Tierney
Charlemagne by Derek Wilson
The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern
A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman
Agincourt by Juliet Barker
*Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor (This represents a refresh of the exercise)
*The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown

* Denotes currently reading.

I plan to read:

The Making of Europe by Robert Bartlett (after the relevant chapters in Cantor)
Sailing from Byzantium by Colin Wells (after completing Cantor)
The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga
On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State by Joseph R. Strayer

And one of (if I haven't by this point exhausted my interest in the period):

The Crusades: A History by Jonathan Riley-Smith
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge

A few years ago, I had tried to read the Civilization of the Middle Ages, but I was frustrated as I felt it assumed a working knowledge of the topic. Now that I am reading it a second time with the benefit of having read Tierney, et al, I appreciate how it synthesizes complex and fascinating debates about the period. Cantor can be a lucid writer and thinker when he wants to be. I also now have an interest in the similarly focused LeGoff book mentioned earlier in the thread as a capstone crystallization of the entire period once I complete the above reading plan, but I will probably wait a few years before turning to LeGoff.

My favorite so far has to be Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity. He writes clearly and with a great deal of passion. If I were a history professor teaching a class on this period, I would certainly assign Brown, as I find myself thinking as I read it of all the paper topics one can explore based on nuggets in this book (e.g., the inevitably of a Christian Europe? our fragile grasp of reason? parallels to current culture wars? etc.).

I want to move on from this period at some point (see http://www.librarything.com/topic/120018), so if you have any recommendations for post-1500 European history, please let me know. I have convinced myself that *this* is how history should be read!

>1 asabel:

THE SHORTER CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY Volumes 1 and 2.

Indispensable for those seeking to orientate themselves to the medieval world.

Anyone interested in posting to topics in this group so that it won't become archived after a year of no action? Once it's archived you can look up old posts, but no more posting. The group becomes 'frozen'. Of course you can always start a new group on the same subject but then you lose all the past conversations and have to scramble up members from scratch.

I've seen and thought about the problems of studying the Middle Ages just as you've described here >1 asabel:.

So that's a very familiar view to me of the situation and one which I largely share.

I agree that taking up Huizinga and Tuchman and others like them sooner rather than later is a good idea.

Sooner or later, there's no escaping the morass of detail.

No one, not even an interested layman can afford to read just a single source on an important topic--whatever it may be--and leave it at that. There are no faultless sources, no absolute "objectivity." And any large field of inquiry, of knowledge, is too large to be encompassed adequately in a single text, no matter how large or multi-volumed.

One can't even recognize the strengths or weaknesses in a treatment or its author unless one reads various other works and writers who deal with the same people and period. There is nothing "wrong" with reading these flawed treatments--especially when one is fore-armed with awareness of their flaws via the critiques of others. To judge the critiques themselves one must read more widely and in numerous sources over a significant period of time.

Letter, diaries, journals, official and unofficial documents from antiquity to the present are bound to contain information which is biased, self-serving, or even flatly false. That doesn't make them useless or of no value or interest.

I learn something from past historians' errors and misjudgments--not just what their errors were but, more importantly and more interesting, why they erred. It's better to find and scrutinize them than to hope to evade them altogether by attempting to read only "careful", "scrupulous", "thorough" historians; and it's perhaps better to just rely on folk-tales, rumor and gossip than to imagine that reading one large scholarly text is sufficient to inform one's self on some topic.

Wherever possible, if a subject (person) is controversial, it's vital to try and find and read his own words (or the best available translation of them*) on the matters under consideration rather than only what contemporary or later commenters and historians have had to say about what he or she thought, did and wrote.

No matter which end of the spy-glass you put to your eye, wide- or narrow-scope, you're going to have to come sooner or later to details of personal accounts which illustrate and inform a more general panorama. That's why Tuchman's "diversions" into detail are essential rather than distractions. Without them, the general picture becomes to arid, strained and abstract.

* for Huizinga, for example, I recommend this edition

Rodney J. Payton (Translator), Ulrich Mammitzsch (Translator)
https://www.librarything.com/work/30998/book/146883298

suggestions from tag-lists:

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/proximity1&tag=medieval+history+-+refer...

https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=Medieval+history+-+literature+and+l...

"A distant mirror" resonates to us today because we see that a very long time ago people had the same needs, desires, and crooked leaders as we do today. wether it was 1320 or 1280 is irrelevant. Those distinctions are important to professional historians who give their students a different slice of boloney every day and then ask them to resurgitate it. It was boring to listen to, and we forgot it right after the exam. Let the pros debate the finer points and let the rest of us enjoy good stories that help explain who we are and how we got here.

>15 proximity1: No one, not even an interested layman can afford to read just a single source on an important topic--whatever it may be--and leave it at that. There are no faultless sources, no absolute "objectivity." And any large field of inquiry, of knowledge, is too large to be encompassed adequately in a single text, no matter how large or multi-volumed.

I tend to agree with this. It has been heartening to see in the field of the Crusades' studies, works that provide at least some balance in that area by modern scholars.

Unfortunately, like in many other areas, the historian has been too quick to turn his own society's lens upon distant ages and puerilely condemning and pontificating with abandon.

Unfortunately, as bad as this is, this has only been a feature produced in Western universities, ushering in a collective cultural epoch of self-abasement.

Thus to read multiple sources is important. Yes read Runciman but read Madden too. Reading about the Hundred Years War, Guy Fawkes, or anything else for that matter in this light, will help form much more stable debate in our own society.

I have just finished a number of books dealing with the Early Plantagenets, "King John," by Marc Morris, the interesting"England without Richard" by Appleby, and "The Greatest Knight" a Bio of William Marshal, by Asbridge. Anyone have thoughts about that tempestuous thirty years?