Lunar Linguistics

This month I read the first volume of Pierre Bottero's La Quête d'Ewilan trilogy. It is a middle-grade fantasy book about 300 pages long.

Probably won't continue the series, though I enjoyed the more informal register—given that most of my exposure to French comes from textbooks and literature, I am actually much more comfortable with formal language at this point in my learning.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✰: A classic tale of Christmas chivalry from the 14th century.

I do wish I went with a newer translation, only because I think much of the beauty of the Middle English language did not come through to me in this mid-century version. Perhaps I will pick up Simon Armitage's 2007 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or, since apparently it takes less than a month of study for Anglophones to develop fluency in Middle English, I will try the original at some future point.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is one of those books which defines its subject matter, and I am very glad I finally got to it. It tells the story of European Christianity 1500 - 1700, excellently balancing narrative and nuance. Covering 200 years of intense religious conflict both accurately and comprehensively merits at least four stars, but the last ~100 pages is a coda on European culture during the period, covering gender, sex, family, rationalism vs. empiricism, antisemitism, urbanism, syphilis, Galileo, the rise of the state, and the emergence of Europe's first gay subcultures within Amsterdam and London. It is so excellently done, and complementary to the rest of the book, that it pushes the work up to a full "five stars."

I am currently spending Christmas in quarantine after a significant exposure this week (😢), so reading a book my mother bought me for Christmas three years ago (2018) is a nice way to still remember the season. 🎄🎉🎁

✭✭✭✭✭: This was my most anticipated book for this year and it did not disappoint. Patrick Wyman synthesizes a tremendous amount of recent scholarship to make a compelling argument for how Europe gained the set of economic institutions needed to leapfrog the traditional cores of world civilization (East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East) in following centuries. Very much in dialogue with Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome (reviewed below), his answer is that the free-for-all of a polycentric state system caused European societies to sacrifice traditional stabilizing practices just to survive. The most obvious of these is the emergence of mass debt. Of the nine structures examined in this book (Exploration, State-Building, Banking, Military Revolution, Printing, Rural Markets, Church Reform, Ottomans, and Habsburgs), only one (Ottomans) did not rely on debt. Wyman believes this is why they fell behind their Western neighbors. While the European states were so used to working with debt that the King of Spain could use revenue from New World silver to five times its immediate effect, the Ottoman state had no way of compensating for declining conquest revenue.

One of my favorite aspects of The Verge is what Wyman leaves out. The Great Divergence debate suffers from an over-abundance of hypotheses, leading to a common "just-so" account of the West's rise. Given the importance of science to the modern world, I think many lesser writers would have twisted themselves around in order to include Da Vinci, Vesalius, Paracelsus, and especially Copernicus. But that would have detracted from Wyman's argument. He is interested in economic institutions (and their knock-ons) c. 1510, and Western science is fundamentally a 17th-century story. Whatever causal role it played in the economic divergence of Europe, it did not do so until the results of debt-fueled economic expansion had been felt and incorporated into society.

The Verge is wonderfully written, contemporary with cutting edge scholarship, and forcefully persuasive. Little things which I have wondered about in the period (e.g. how the princelings of the HRE could have been so aggressive when by definition at least half are going to be losing out at any given time) are well-explained by reasonable analogies (i.e. the cost-benefit analysis for modern massive corporations has them constantly suing each other, even though it is costly and many of them are bound to lose too). Probably the most enlightening episode was Charles V's failed "universal monarchy." After years of fighting, in 1525 Charles captured his arch-rival, the French King Francis I, at the Battle of Pavia. If Charles had deposed him and integrated France into his other lands, the resulting empire of 47 million would have been been over 2/3rds of Europe.* Actions like this have long been done in the other cores of settled civilization, such as the integration of the Southern Tang into the Song as a way of "restoring" the Chinese Empire. But the 1000 years between 500 and 1500 had sufficiently eroded the institutions of "Empire" and "Christendom" in favor of a celluar system of distinct polities (described by Chris Wickham Medieval Europe, reviewed below). It did not matter that Charles had the imperial title, papal support, and the largest army in Europe: the dozens of separate entities which made up Charles' realm were never his unconditionally and they could resist being congealed into one whole. Never even considering annexing France, he squandered his opportunity and 30 years later permanently partitioned his lands amongst his heirs. The European state system had proved itself unique in the degree to which is resisted control by a single man. This matters because while the Ottomans had the hegemonic power to effectively ban the printing press for over 200 years in the name of stability,† the Kings of France could not even stop offensive pamphlets from being brought in from Geneva, just four miles outside their borders. This lack of state power likely hurt Europe economically in the short run—the extremely destructive 30 Years' War is a direct outcome of this fracture—but in the long-run, the diversity of experiments it fostered proved decisive in the Great Divergence.

✭✭✭✰✰: This is a sweeping work of scholarship about one of Europe's most important institutions. The Holy Roman Empire, heir to Charlemagne (and perhaps Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ too), was so much more than the "loose confederation of German states" I was taught about in school. It was the best Latin Christian claimant to "Roman-ism," either the sword of or rival to the papacy, and the grounds for much of the negotiation of power for almost a thousand years. Wilson's choice to give a series of thematic rather than chronological interpretations was a very good one: there are far too many names and places to remember, but it was always clear in the moment exactly why they were introduced. I came away knowing that the Empire is vital to the history of European pluralism, feudalism, intellectual thought (the "translation" of the Roman Empire is fascinating), and national development. As I continue to march from Antiquity to the Modern Europe, these are a series of correctives to the typical story of 800 - 1800 to try and keep in mind.

The reason this book rates merely a "Very Good" and not an "Excellent" is just that I failed to retain many of the details. In fairness, I read it while home work sick and even in the moment I was getting fatigued quite easily. Perhaps it is unfair to allow my circumstances to accentuate a weakness in the book, but I am lucky that Peter H. Wilson is almost certainly not going to be affected by my choice. I will definitely return to Heart of Europe to use as a reference in the future.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✰: This is officially my second month doing this feature (though Gahmuret's Prelude was basically my Month Zero), and I am still feeling great about this decision. Without it, there is a 0% chance I would have read more than a few pages of Chronicles. For those unfamiliar, Froissart was a French nobleman during the 14th century with connections to both sides of the 100 Years' War. He is notable for his wide breadth of knowledge, excellent writing, and his ideology of honor—even as he catalogs the mass murder committed by those he calls "the finest flower of French chivalry." Dan Jones, a popular historian who I respect, mentioned recently in an interview that he wants to write a fiction series set in this period where "each chapter starts with a quote from one of the chivalric-minded sources like Froissart" to be juxtaposed with the "medieval Full Metal Jacket" reality of the battle.

Froissart is such a talented chronicler that one cannot help but notice the contradictions in his explanations. In describing the 1381 Great Rising, he states: "There were many whose only object was to destroy the nobles and seize their wealth... That was the main reason this had all begun." Yet his facts show that not to be the case at all. The peasants rally especially behind John Ball, who preaches an ideology of equality. They demand specific writs freeing them from serfdom. Once these are given, the masses are divided: half want to retreat to their hamlets, armed with the king's word. The other half knows what was so painfully extracted could be easily retracted, and wish to further consolidate power to prevent that. This sophisticated understanding of political reality is the driver of the violence Froissart recounts, not a mindlessness or nihilism. The chronicler also presents the order of the violence as being noble-led. Without any justification of self-defense, the Mayor of London kills Wat Tyler, a knight slaughters a dozen in a mob, and King Richard II leads an army against the assembled peasants. A lesser historian might have simply written what he wished had happened, but Froissart tries his best to justify the specific facts he has discovered. Since the nobles must have been in the right in killing him, Wat Tyler must have been supremely rude to the king. 

Beyond the three great uprisings (Jacquerie, Ghent, and Wat Tyler) and the 100 Year's War, Froissart includes revealing sections on social life. The creation of the Order of the Garter, the process of inspecting the health of a potential Queen of France, and the emergence of flagellants during The Black Death all jump to mind. A section from Book IV is our best source for the amazing true story faithfully recreated in the recent Ridley Scott movie, The Last Duel. The importance of urban leadership, a theme from Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, is surprisingly present here as well. Overall, the translation was great, the writing (after the first few more matter-of-fact sections) was fun, the stories were interesting, and I had a better feel for how medieval chronicles work. Definitely an all-around great experience.

Lunar Linguistics

I have been all over the place this month. I started it with two solid weeks of Attic vocabulary work, decided I was going to try Anglo-Saxon after seeing a French person being smug that they could read their Early Medieval tongue while us English-speakers can't, realized that I was not (yet) willing to commit to actually putting in the time to memorizing the fundamentals so abandoned it, then I started a French-language chapter book, took a break from that and forgot what was happening, came back and got confused, stopped, started an easier French chapter book, also took a break from that, and ended up here on the 29th with no prospect of having anything more accomplished by December 1st.

The one solid accomplishment I did have was learning cursive. I was never taught it in school, never needed it, and could (usually) make it out due to knowing my mom's handwriting. Those peanuts comics where snoopy wrote letters home from the war were an absolute nightmare for me growing up, though. Anyway, I took some time out in the evening and learned to write cursive. It's not pretty, but I understand a lot better why other people's handwriting is the way it is, and it was fun picking up a new skill. This was not the sort of thing that I was expecting to put in here under "linguistics," but I definitely feel it is equivalent to, say, learning kanji.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Will to Battle takes all my favorite aspects of Terra Ignota—interesting setting, philosophical puzzles, absurd characters that still invite pathos—and continues churning them through plot at a rate reminiscent of the frantic last third of George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords. Our narrator not only is writing in a faux 18th century style, but he also debates the reader (and/or Thomas Hobbes) in-between bouts of psychosis which his editor ("9A") has decided to stop editing out, making one wonder just how much was removed from the previous two books. 

I am trying to avoid spoilers, but here is a quote which captures the joy of this book:

Character 1: "It’s just the part about how you came into existence that makes no sense.”

Character 2: “In most senses I agree. Though it makes narrative sense, and narrative is a powerful force in the world, at least for me."

✭✭✭✰✰: Book 2 of Terra Ignota picks up where Too Like the Lightning leaves off. Ada Palmer crafts a plausible mid-future utopia: after the "exponential age" (roughly the years 1800 - 2100) ended in a US-led catastrophic nuclear war, some of the leading trans-national institutions (seemingly: the European Union, the Olympic Committee, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and Greenpeace, among others) offered Americans scattered across the world the chance to renounce their citizenship in exchange for a set of laws and obligations more in line with their values—ending with a stroke the nation-state. The details are only hinted at obliquely, but this crisis led to "the best and greatest work of politics the human race has ever seen" to match the economic and communications revolutions brought about by 6000 mile-per-hour transit and instant communication.

While the world of 2454 is "a utopia, not perfect, not finished, but still a utopia compared to every other era," in any story there must be conflict, and Palmer does a good job making the world imperfect without downplaying its genuine achievements. The grand politics are well-handled, failing to fall into the three traps I find too often in genre-fiction: (1) direct allegory, (2) blunt power-politics, (3) differences which make no difference. A shockingly high amount of the conflict comes down to "intelligent, well-meaning characters with a lot of information coming to different but reasonable conclusions."

My biggest complaint so far is about the characters of Madame D'Arouet, King Isabel Carlos II, and Heloïse. I find them completely unsympathetic, uninteresting, and far too effective at getting others to do as they wish. I hate any time they are "on screen," as the author chooses them to be the vector for ideas which I wish were explored by Vivien, Thisbe, Bridger, and Carlyle. The book also earns a lower rating (merely "Very Good") because the Wolfean confusion I loved in Too Like the Lightning has faded with familiarity with the setting.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is the first novel in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. The author came to my attention when she went on "ReReading Wolfe" to discuss his Book of the New Sun. As there is no way that the third most popular* Gene Wolfe podcast could, in any cynical sense, be worth the time of a Hugo-nominated professor of history at the University of Chicago, she must have done it out of genuine love for the deceased cult writer. In her interview, Palmer described how pioneers' influence is often felt through the work of later imitators who water-down (more charitably: polish) the original innovation enough to be palatable; Wolfe discovered cocoa, while Palmer produced the 60% dark chocolate bar. If that analogy wasn't very clear (I apologize, dear reader), Palmer kept Gene Wolfe's strange language, disorienting point of view, and blurred lines between sci-fi political intrigue and religio-fantasy, but presented it in a form much more approachable to your average reader. She even kept Wolfe's exhausting habit of presenting five brilliant ideas per page for hundreds of pages. Less than 72 hours from first hearing her speak, I had completed Too Like the Lightning and was anxiously awaiting its sequel from my local public library.

That said, the book is not flawless. It does one thing I really hate: out of ten billion people, a handful are super geniuses able to manipulate world events while (so far at least) everyone else is just acted upon. I understand that it is hard to tell stories where characters both make big decisions and the rest of the world has agency too. Though she handles it better than most, it still feels clunky. In addition, the in-world narrator intentionally mimics the style of an 18th-century sentimental novel. This can easily turn grating. Finally, the sexual content requires a warning: while it is well justified by the story and themes, it is unpleasant and upsetting. For me at least, these were but minor distractions for a novel of such ambition and wonder, but still I would not begrudge anyone who found them intolerable.

✭✭✭✰✰: I originally picked up this book because I was curious about the "Acts of Pilate," a source which Gregory of Tours alludes to in his History of the Franks [reviewed below]. I heard Bart Ehrman addressed it in here, but it took reading it to find out he only mentions it once: "None of our sparse references to the Acts of Pilate indicates, or even suggests... [it] was once considered canonical."

What I received instead was a well-reasoned introduction to our sources for the New Testament, as well as Bart Ehrman's eminently reasonable philosophy of history, which I will paraphrase:

There are many methods that we use to arrive at knowledge: there is science, where one performs experiments over and over again and see if things turn out the same; there is abstract reason, where one can prove that the interior angles of a square must always add up to 360°; and there is history, which posits the most probable version of the past given the information we have. History, despite being my beloved discipline, is limited—that is, there are many true things we cannot know through history. As any good Kantian will remind you, there is no series of primary sources which can confirm for you that 7 + 5 must always add up to 12. Nor, can we use the historical method to say whether my great-grandfather Constantine Shelly had breakfast on March 22nd, 1921 because there are no records for us to use. I bring this up to make clear that, if the historical method made it seem quite improbable that Jesus of Nazareth existed, it should trouble someone who knows of him via a different method (say, faith or abstract reasoning) no more than science showing that it never rains fire should trouble someone who believes in the miracle of Egypt's ten plagues. After all, would it be a miracle if it did not require God?

Since the above is a paraphrase of Bart Ehrman's thoughts, one could be excused for assuming this was a prelude to disproving the historical Jesus in a way which saves face for Christians. It is not. Instead, Ehrman convincingly argues on strictly historical terms that we should believe that there was a Palestinian Jew named "Jesus" who died around 30 CE and is the basis for the gospel accounts. Using the tools of the profession (comparing sources, analyzing dissimilarities, dating texts via archaeology and philology), he shows that we have strong evidence for "seven independent accounts" of parts of the Jesus story. The information is exactly the form we would expect from a mix of oral and written traditions from a messianic movement around the years of Jesus' alleged death, and parts of our evidence even suggest we have the writings of people (such as Paul) who met the brother of Jesus, something which requires a central conspiracy (not in line with the diffused, oral nature of our sources) or a lie which would have been both extremely risky and implausible to the preexisting Christian communities of Asia Minor.

Due to the sensitive nature of the gospels, I do not think I have the skills to use them in a high school class, but Ehrman (himself not a Christian but extremely respectful of them) expertly demonstrates that they are the perfect objects for the sort of historical analysis I teach. I think I may adapt some of his examples to secular sources to demonstrate the core skills of our discipline.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is an amazing book. Even for John Iliffe, a leading expert on African history, it is bold to attempt to cover the whole continent since the "emergence of food-producing communities" in just 300 pages. And yet, he somehow succeeds. By synthesizing written accounts with recent insights from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology he produces an inclusive, insightful, and lucid bottom-up understanding of the continent. His uniting thesis is that Africans have suffered from a unique structural challenge relative to the most studied regions of the world: under-population. The fickle environment, the difficulty of pre-modern transportation, and especially endemic disease have made just maintaining population levels difficult. Practices which have long seen as signs of African inferiority by Western chauvinists (e.g., polygyny, slavery, extensive farming, statelessness) are logical outcomes of labor shortage. Iliffe does not swing towards romanticizing these practices, no more than a historian of the Early Middle Ages defends Viking raids by explaining their rationale. The mere assumption that Africans are as flexible, resourceful, and intelligent as anyone else allows him to explain the structures which define the continent without reverting to cliché.

Yet, in all his sweeping and summarizing and synthesizing, he still keeps in mind the fundamental diversity of Africans: some remained hunter-gatherers, some became farmers, others still are herders. Just because Iliffe allows these to be rational choices based on circumstances does not mean he ever assumes they are the only rational choice. Africans has almost an artisanal quality to it: the whole is cohesive, each chapter is self-contained, each paragraph immensely informative, and every sentenced obviously labored over. Each of its pages is basically an individual essay on the widest variety of topics, from politics to economics to the family to religion. The extensive footnotes clearly represent only a fraction of the thought shaping every decision of the writing process. Iliffe even is willing to admit when we reach the limits of our current knowledge (e.g., the failure of both state and market led industrialization). A book which manages to do all of that while staying readable is a triumph. Any future lesson I teach on the continent will be drawing upon the structure provided by Professor Iliffe, as well as the many recommendations for further reading.

✭✭✰✰✰: This is the story of De rerum natura (English: "On the Nature of Things")—a 7,000 line poem on Atomism by the Roman philosopher Lucretius—and its rediscovery in 15th century Italy. Stephen Greenblatt describes how the work sent shock waves through the Renaissance world, inspiring the scientific achievements of Galileo, the philosophy of Montaigne, the literature of Shakespeare, and the liberal vision of Thomas Jefferson. Even good Puritans like Lucy Hutchinson found themselves drawn to the worldview of the ancient rationalist. Only the papacy—corrupt, venal, and lecherous—presented an obstacle to its spread. The story is excellently written. It would not have won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize if it was not. Professor Greenblatt spends long sections on the lives of the people De rerum natura touched, which I found immensely enjoyable. His central character, the brilliant and witty humanist bureaucrat Poggio Bracciolini, was the perfect vehicle to explore how ancient knowledge reentered Western consciousness.

Yet the central argument strikes me as absurd. The Middle Ages are called "the triumph of pain seeking" over "rational comprehension of the hidden structures of all things." The entire thousand years are summed up with monks who "whipped themselves with thorny branches or struck themselves with jagged stones." Christianity, emotionally gratifying but dogmatic, kept Europeans in a rut until their scientific emancipation. While I agree with Greenblatt that there was a sharp inflection (a "swerve") in European history around 1450,* Lucretius' resurgent popularity is a symptom of that shift, not the cause. Ideas are important, but they are also common—it simply does not require a once-in-two-millennia genius to challenge received wisdom. Certainly for Poggio and his friends, a Latin pedigree can help an idea's adoption. But Domenico "Menocchio" Scandella, an Italian miller burned during the Renaissance, was able to posit a materialistically evolving world without citing Lucretius. Greenplatt's account denies this possibility, as well as the pivotal role played by Christians in the advance of science. I am sure the author would contend that his critique is against dogmatic or anti-rational Christianity, but no matter how much one narrows the aperture, one can find true believers on the front-line of Early Modern learning.

Finding out Greenblatt is not a historian but a literature professor helped me understand why he insists on rooting this transformation to the minds and writing of elite individuals, when the historical evidence we have points to a structural change in European society. Ultimately, The Swerve is an exploration of ideas and feelings, and not a strictly factual story of how the world became "modern." As a work of literary interpretation, I can say it was a success: it made me want to read Lucretius, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. As a history, it was lacking.

✭✭✰✰✰: I learned of Jacques Barzun (1907 - 2012) from his radio obituary. It was short: French-American, began teaching at Columbia in 1928, and (apparently) stayed sharp until the end. I remember wondering: What must it be like to have more than a lifetime of knowledge bouncing around in one's head? 

Published in 2000, when Jacques Barzun was only 93 years old, From Dawn to Decadence is an attempt to capture human experience on a scale appropriate to his long life. I was initially going to break my review into quarters corresponding to the four "revolutions" promised in the introduction, but I did not because (1) the revolutions did not turn out to meaningfully structure the work, (2) I did not want to set myself the precedent of such a long review, and (3) I would not enjoy spending that much time with this book. That leaves me one review to cover almost a 1000 pages of dense cultural history, so I will need to organize it into three sections: the Ugly, the Bad, and the Good.

The Ugly: Jacques Barzun is an opponent of what he describes as "political correctness," and uses this book as an opportunity to settle the issue. These section are distracting, poorly argued, and embarrassing. Some representative examples are: that 'man' isn't gendered and there is no short, easy word which means 'human'; that since some American Indians were violent, condemnations of their genocide come from rose-tinted moralism; that it is entirely appropriate to honor people for doing bad things, if they do them effectively (e.g., Robert E. Lee). Barzun defends Columbus by saying we cannot hold him accountable for the later actions of others, seemingly unaware that Columbus himself ordered mass murder and slavery. His contrarianism just sets him up to be proved wrong, such as insisting Richard III was not hunchbacked (we found his corpse under a parking lot the month before Barzun passed, and it, of course, validated the mainstream view on his health). Similarly, Barzun will drop in obnoxious statements without evidence, like that "literacy [is] in decline," or that democracy can be as dictatorial as monarchy. He mentions that Napoleon's expedition to Egypt is "virtually unknown to the educated in the western world," when it is likely the third or fourth most famous thing about him; and that Jules Verne is only remembered for Around the World in 80 Days. These last two are not really errors as much as artifacts of significant cultural difference between his time and ours, which emphasize how out of touch he is.

The Bad: This is a book defending the Western Canon against its detractors. Thus Barzun goes through, figure by figure, to demonstrate the value of their achievements. But several of his expository techniques do more harm than good. The first, a sort of flattening, finds certain common themes across the 500 year and assigns works or movements to them. Yet this analysis empties them: how useful is it to reduce fear of climate change to "Primitivism," and thus categorize it as our equivalent of Thoreau and Luther? One cannot but help see here a tired mind for whom form is indistinguishable from substance. Another annoying tendency is to highlight past figures because they agree with Barzun. He is careful to show that, for example, Rousseau is actually a Barzunian, despite his influence running entirely in the opposite direction. Sydney Smith is probably the most glaring of these: he is relevant because he went Left when Barzun would go Left, and went Right when Barzun would go Right. If you are not already in complete agreement with Barzun, it is hard to see what you would get from this exposition. When a figure he admires obviously disagrees with him, it is because that person is lying about their beliefs. This is how Shaw, someone who ranged from 'Bernie Sanders socialist' in the 1880s to 'Joseph Stalin socialist' in the 1940s is shown to be secretly "disillusioned:" 

In his last years, Shaw extolled Russian Communism. But one suspects a different spirit within the motive. His approval of government by murder and massacre looks like a desperate gambler's last throw. It contradicts not only a lifetime of clear pragmatic thought, since protracted violence means practical failure, but also the plays written at the same time as the advocacy: The Apple Cart, On the Rocks,* and Geneva, the first pair arguing against persecuting dissent, even though democracy is in danger; the third, ridiculing Hitler and Mussolini, whose method paralleled Stalin's.

There's a scene in Paradise Lost I could not help but think of during these sections: the devil flies around the newly created world, and despite all its beauty he only thinks about himself and his own boredom.

The Good: Paradoxically, it is when Barzun explores thinkers without connecting them to other periods that they feel most relevant to the present. His descriptions of Shakespeare, Pierre Bayle, Charles Babbage, and the court of Louis XIV were genuinely insightful. I now want to spend more time with Montaigne, Pascal, and Horace Walpole. Barzun even earned the high honor of placing a book he recommended onto my reading list (This Little Band of Prophets, about the British Fabians). While it often seems like his takeaway from 100 years of learning is that it silly to "spare the victims" of "bodily and mental infirmities" by watching our language, he does occasionally shows real insight, like with his "theory of aspect": that thinkers can be meaningfully dialogued with from multiple valid angles, and thus they fall in and out of relevance without fundamentally changing.

Jacques Barzun was an elitist, anti-democratic snob who made factual mistakes trying to prove the "decadence" of our era. He is a Western chauvinist, attacking the music, politics, and intellectual rigor of other cultures. I imagine I would hate spending time with him, even discussing things we both loved. From Dawn to Decadence also had about 100 pages of genuinely interesting material. I expect others to have a similar reaction to me, but which exact 100 pages strike their fancy likely varies considerably from person to person. That's a testament to the sheer breadth of Barzun's learning, if nothing else.

✭✭✭✰✰: After completing volume 5 of the Penguin History of Europe, I am officially into the Modern Era. Yet, the transition was not due to a conscious movement to end the old order. The catastrophic wars ripping through Central, Eastern, and Insular Europe were products of conservative leaders trying to thwart "innovation," a word still derogatory. For reasons they could not fully explain, the structures of society became impossible to maintain. Heresies spread further, and put down deeper roots. Urban elites could now sometimes defeat rural elites. Central governments, whether monarchical or parliamentary, concentrated increasing amount of political power in one place. The execution of Charles I or the departure of the Pilgrims from Leiden were little more than "surface disturbances, crests of foam"—in Fernand Braudel's famous metaphor—but they indicated that "the tides of history" were carrying Europe out of the Middle Ages via a compounding series of crises. 

I like the framing of "compounding crises" because it is hard to separate the mutually reinforcing trends from one another. Did newly ascendant bourgeoisie check the power of nobles, or did the bourgeoisie gain in power only because nobles were weakened? Did technological innovation create an incentive for capital markets, or did the expansion of available capital markets allow the pace of invention to advance? We know similar events were happening across Europe, but they are replicated with key difference in the details; thus cause and effect cannot be cleanly disentangled.

Three recurring concepts—more motifs than specific trends—stand out: "Debt," "War," and "Religion." Debt became central to European economy and society in this period. This was dangerous: many religions strictly control debt because it makes people desperate. The price of failing to pay ones debts could be imprisonment or the enslavement of one's children. The Conquistadors, most heavily in debt, committed genocide for gold. But while debt disintegrates the social fabric, it is also rocket fuel for the economy. By being able to pull consumption forward in time, one can stimulate production and even (in theory) make everyone better off. The discovery of the New World, the creation of the printing press, and practically all long distance trade relied on debt. Debt also paid for war, as there was no other way for states to mobilize on the scale that became necessary. Tiny Holland was able to win its independence from Spain because, with its culture of banking and cooperation from merchant elites, they only had to front a fraction as much money on every purchase as an enemy whom few trusted not to eventually default. The sheer level of violence in this and other conflicts is remarkable: as just one example, the English Civil War was 3.5x as lethal on a per capita basis as World War I. These wars were of course about "balance of power" and "raison d'état" and competing mercantile interests; but more than anything they were over religion. Latin Christianity was regionally diverse, but it still believed itself united in one church. The periodization of this book, along with its title, reflects the centrality of that fact: 1517 was when Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation by (supposedly) nailing his theses to the cathedral door, while 1648 is notable for permanently bringing to the heart of Europe 'Cuius regio, eius religio' (English: "he who rules, his religion") for the three main Latin Christian schisms—Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Religious diversity was here to stay, despite the wishes of practically everyone in Christendom.

Overall, this book rates a "very good." I do still have some minor complaints. The early chapters are a little muddled, the intellectual history feels disconnected from everything else, and the sudden rush into the 17th century for the last section of the book is a bit jarring. Additionally, I did not come away with a good understanding of either the play-by-play maneuvers nor the main outline of the period's defining wars, but that may have more to do with the complexity of those conflicts than any choice by the author. The stand-out portions of this book are, not surprisingly, the topics I already think define this period: (1) the splintering of Latin Europe along confessional lines, and (2) the integration of fiscal state-building into every aspect of politics. This is a work of the quality I have come to expect from the this series, and I am excited to keep marching through to the present day.

Lunar Linguistics

I wanted to break up the book reviews with another form of learning: language acquisition. Some people are very serious in becoming polyglots, but for me it is just a fun hobby I treat like a crossword. I try to learn a few words here and there while watching TV, or as I get ready for bed. Weirdly, the lack of specific objective allows me to progress further because there is no pressure to feel I am hitting some minimum standard. The two languages I am working on right now are French and Attic Greek, with the latter being the subject of this post.

Attic is the variety of Ancient Greek which was used in and around Athens during its 5th century Golden Age, and is usually contrasted with its descendants Koine Greek (used for much of the Bible), and Modern Greek (spoken today). I absolutely love it, but I have a hard time explaining its beauty. Perhaps it is the script (usually the later byzantine cursive "minuscule" is taught), or the lyric meter which the language lends itself to. Above all, though, the outstanding feature is the case system. For the unfamiliar, English—a distant cousin of Greek—retains it for certain pronouns; i.e., "he," "him," and "his" are all distinct despite referring to the same object. In Greek, words like "city" and "water" too have multiple forms. This makes it fiendishly difficult to learn—the word "the" has roughly 26 different translations (see: "Chart")—but it also allows every word to contain more information. Aristotle's "ζῷον πολιτικόν" means "Humans are civic creatures," and Protagoras' "Man is the thing by which all is measured" is just: "ἄνθρωπος μέτρον."

It has been a long time since my one year of college Attic, so I decided to restart from the beginning. Donald Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek is a masterpiece of textbook design. Developed for the University of California system, it methodically lays out the core of the Ancient Greek language while slowly creating a bank of vocabulary you are expected to memorize. I use Memrise, a fantastic piece of free Spaced Repetition Software, to help with this. At this point I have the most common ~300 or so lemmas (words and their obvious variations) committed to memory, maybe 10% - 15% of what I would need to fluently read basic material without a dictionary. Interestingly, Mastronarde starts his course at practically the other end of the language as my university professor did, so I am already engaging new material despite being just 16 units in (out of 42). Each unit ends in a series of exercises: identify forms, translate passages, and read for understanding. The number of exercises varies wildly without clear explanation (e.g., it might be 5 for the first problem set, then 9, then 14, and finally 3), yet it always feels like the exact right number. One gets the impression that Professor Mastronarde not only has a deep knowledge of the language, but a strong intuition for how new learners interact with it—part of why I love his book.

I opted not to use a star-system for Lunar Linguistics (the name simply refers to the planned monthly nature of my updates) because that would mean rating myself in a way I find unpleasant, but I will say that I am very happy with the progress I made with Attic this month. I am also considering bringing in my "physical learning" (running and weight lifting), but those too have to wait until a later day.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✰✰✰: I am trying out a new feature, where I make myself read at least one sizeable primary source every month. Primary sources are those which allow historians most direct access to the period they are studying: they can be court records, diaries, receipts, or even histories written during the period of interest. They are incredibly important, but also often difficult to work with, requiring a tremendous amount of knowledge to interpret properly. I would rather read a modern history by someone who has already spent decades working with the sources of that period than try to figure out for myself when, say, the original author is leaving out information to please a patron or exaggerating for effect. Yet doing so—relying solely on the work of others—does deprive one of a certain appreciation for how we know what we know. Additionally, as a history teacher, a core part of the curriculum is primary source analysis; thus I need to both keep an eye out for passages to use as classroom exercises, as well as practice engaging with new texts myself.

The History of the Franks is one of the key documents for understanding the European Middle Ages.† Written in the 6th century by the Bishop of Tours, Gregory, it chronicles history "since the world began" until the present, c. 600 CE. The way Gregory divides up time is telling about his (elite, Latin Christian) view of world history:

"From the Beginning until the Deluge, 2242 years. From the Deluge until the Passage of the Red Sea by the Children of Israel, 1404 years. From the Passage of the Red Sea until the Resurrection of our Lord, 1808 years. From the Resurrection of our Lord until the death of Saint Martin, 412 years. From the death of Saint Martin until the year mentioned above, that is the twenty-first after my own consecration, which is the fifth year of Gregory, Pope of Rome, the thirty-third of King Guntram and the nineteenth of Childebert II, 197 years. This makes a grand total of 5792 years."

Each of those events is elaborated upon, and the story proper begins with the close of Book I around the dawn of the 5th century. As one might expect from a bishop in a time of political flux, there is a strong focus on legitimizing the institutions, beliefs, and practices which structured Gregory's life in post-Roman Gaul. Meanwhile, high politics is reduced to a series of personal rivalries and implausible deceit which, in all honesty, I found impossible to follow. Interspersed are tales of abductions, murders, theft, resurrection, false miracles, and other such lurid affairs. While we cannot judge the veracity of the described events, they are very important in at least informing us about what Frankish people believed was out of the ordinary. One, the murder of Sichar by his friend Chramnesind, neatly illustrates early medieval honor codes. Another—my personal favorite—was the story of 20 men who drowned after looting a monastery. Gregory attributes this outcome to divine retribution: "If anyone thinks that this happened by chance, let him consider the fact that one innocent man was saved among so many who were doing evil." This anecdote not only shows that Gregory was anxious to see the work of God everywhere, but that there were dissenters whom he felt he had to refute. 

It might not be clear from the above review, but this book was extremely boring, even to me. Yet I am very glad that I read it, as I do feel I understand both the period and the practice of writing about it more than I would otherwise. I plan to read another primary source next month, but also not any sooner.

CW: Sexual Assault

✭✭✰✰✰: It pains me to give Barbara Tuchman a sub-5 score. Tuchman is perhaps the 20th century's greatest English-language writer of history prose; I am strongly considering re-reading The Proud Tower solely so I can quote from it in a later review. Yet here she fails in the basic task she sets herself: telling the history of the 14th century. Tuchman shrouds the political intrigue at the center of her story with a rich cultural tapestry, but a cloak of rotted threads provides no warmth.* Her understanding derives from the most literary of historians, not the most authoritative. A random sampling of her bibliography shows her secondary sources (the contemporary academic work which should allow her to interpret the primary material accurately) are on average published around 1908, seventy years prior to A Distant Mirror. Jules Michelet (b. 1798) and Edward Gibbon (b. 1737) are directly quoted in the text; they are, of course, phenomenal writers, but it takes a nihilist to believe that our understanding of the Middle Ages has not improved since The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776 - 89. This leads to her confidently asserting important, interesting, and impressive claims which also happen to be false. Here are three examples:

"Maternal love is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place."

"If he had led a rapid and spartan advance with all energies and resources applied to the objective, the outcome could well have been different. But the 'if' asks for a modern attitude in a medieval age."

"As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success."

Again, the issue here is not with the sort of topics she touches, but with the unfortunate fact that her explanations are false. Maternal love did not "atrophy," even during the height of child mortality. Counterfactual thinking was not antithetical to medievals, nor was allowing commoners to play a major role in battle. Tuchman further disservices her reader by taking propaganda as fact when it is salacious enough; for example, she uncritically states that the King of England—Edward III—violently raped the Countess of Salisbury despite her source: (1) getting wrong the relevant dates, the name of the Countess, and the manner of her husband's death, (2) being in contradiction of copious English accounts of the era, (3) having originated from a polity at war with Edward and England when it was written. When Tuchman does hit upon a true aspect of the period (e.g., "The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century. The funds were squeezed from the people for a cause which could in no way, present or future, benefit them"), one is required to already know that what she says is true, as so many equally compelling statements of hers turn out to be false.

Additionally, her motivating conceit (that the chaos of the 14th century "mirrors" that of her own time) misses hard. It perhaps seemed irresistible when she began writing the book during the Watergate crisis, but the idea that 1978 was some unique era of crisis seems laughable.

✭✭✭✰✰: Alain de Botton—a trust fund kid whose other books have titles like How Proust Can Change Your Life, Religion for Atheists, and How to Think More About Sex—is easy to mock. His grounding opinion, as far as I can tell, is that human beings are barely more than raw cravings for love and attention. To that effect, he once made a porn website whose chief innovation was showing the vulnerable inner thoughts of each participant, a product so widely ridiculed I believe it no longer exists.* Yet the topic broached by Status Anxiety is perfect for an over-sentimental, under-ambitious scion of an elite European family. Someone whose public persona is already of a corny dweeb is actually at an advantage to proceed honestly about the terror caused when someone asks "so, what do you do for a living?"

The book's style is reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and is clearly in the wisdom literature tradition of self help. It has short, self-contained sections on a given theme, usually more wandering from one idea to another than building to an argument. The ideas are not as clearly demarcated as the chapter titles (e.g., "Causes: Snobbery," "Solutions: Art," "Solutions: Religion") would indicate, and I frequently found myself reading just a page or two at a time without disorientation. The primary form of explication is through referencing the most basic of high brow culture. This is an awkward choice. Surely the most profound influences on De Botton are not solely staples of high school and college syllabuses (e.g., Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Inferno, Othello, The Wealth of Nations, Madame Bovary), yet these choices are also not nearly as well-known as, say, Star Wars or Harry Potter. For a pseudo-intellectual like me—widely-aware, mildly-read, and pretty dumb—these references are actually well-aimed, but no one has ever used "target audience of August" as a compliment.

Still, the project of using philosophy to address daily problems is one I find compelling, even if sometimes the engagement is quite shallow; this next week, I will reflect on a few well-phrased aphorisms and see if it succeeds in increasing my mental tranquility.

Rating System: I think this might be a good place to explain my rating system. The 1/2/3/4/5-star system assumes one reads some good books, some great books, some bad books, and perhaps a couple of great or awful books. For me, that is not true. Life is too short to make a habit of reading mediocre books. I do not start most books I am familiar with, and I do not even finish most books I do start. Thus, if I were to give a '5' to every book that was 'very good,' basically everything on here would be 5-star. In order for the rating scale to be useful, I am limiting '5's to books which fundamentally change the way I view the world, and '4's to those which either influence how I teach a subject, or have some other factor which makes them stand out. So the fact that Empires of the Sea is "only" getting 3-stars should not be interpreted as calling it middling; if it were truly middling, I would have stopped reading. Roger Crowley is in fact an excellent writer of popular history. But his purpose is to entertain a general audience, not to offer new interpretations or do original research (though his books are very well-researched), basically a prerequisite to score above a '3.'

✭✭✭✰✰: Anyway, onto the book. I decided to rest my brain a little bit with a fun book on military history before continuing my marathon through the "Penguin History of Europe." Empires turned out to be a nice soft-landing for the 16th century, reintroducing me to some of the period's dominating personalities—(historians from Fernand Braudel to Patrick Wyman tend to love the 16th century because it is so filled by larger than life characters): Emperor Charles V, his son Philip II, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, his son Selim II, and the crusading Pope Pius V all play a leading role in Crowley's story. Any good narrative requires a strong supporting cast, and in this Crowley does not disappoint. There is the brilliant corsair lord Hayreddin "Barbarossa," born a Christian but converted to waging a naval Jihad; Grandmaster La Valette of the Knights of St. John, who keeps his faith despite experiencing hell on earth; the cruel Ottoman pasha Mustafa; and Philip's dashing illegitimate brother—aptly named Don Juan—who must lead the forces of the Holy League in the epic Battle of Lepanto (1571). The book covers half a century of attempted expansion by the Mediterranean's new superpower, the Ottoman Empire, and goes in-depth on several major set-piece battles. The highlight was the 1565 Siege of Malta, where a massively outnumbered garrison lasted six months against overwhelming enemy power. The story ends with a deadlock: the Ottomans remain the strongest power on the sea, but without the ability to expand.

If this were an academic work, I would expect more analysis of these events. For example, it is not clear to me how much ideological force Christianity had in international politics; it seemed at some points to be given great weight, and at other points hardly any at all. Similarly, navies are presented as both major costs as well as sources of revenue; no effort is made to examine at what point or what circumstances they were net contributors or net drains on national treasuries. The social institution of slavery is crucial to the story—the largest source of revenue from navies was actually captured human beings—but is not explored. Assumptions we have about racial chattel slavery obviously do not apply, with foreign-slaves often rising to prestigious positions (Müezzinzade Ali Pasha was an outsider in the Ottoman administration precisely because he was Turkish!), but there is something resembling a a proto-racialism in the treatment of the Spanish moriscos. A complementary proto-nationalism in the Italian city states yields further questions for comparative analysis. Still, as a work of entertainment, it succeeded. Crowley has an excellent eye for the telling detail, and I am going to end this review with a hilarious quote from a Spanish cardinal about Pope Pius V, suddenly generous after a long period of stinginess:

'His Holiness has demonstrated the truth of one of our Castilian proverbs: that the constipated die from diarrhea.'

✭✭✭✭✭: Medieval Europe is simply an excellent series of essays on 500 CE - 1500 CE. It is more analysis than narrative, or, in Chris Wickham's own words, "This is an interpretation of the middle ages, not a textbook account—there are anyway many of the latter, many of them excellent, and they do not need to be added to."

The longer chronological scope of this work vis-à-vis Inheritance of Rome allows Wickham to flesh out what strikes me as the uniting trend of an otherwise diverse period of Western European history: the transition from states with public sphere limited to the monarch's central court to states with dense networks of local protagonists and institutions, a form Wickham calls "cellular." The cellular society allowed non-elites (or at least, locally-based rather than "national" elites) to more successfully negotiate their relationships with others. Thus by 1500 we have a Latin Europe paradoxically both politically descended from a single Carolingian structure while also possessing a tremendous diversity of towns, cities, states, monasteries, universities, leagues, military orders, prince-bishoprics, and marches—all potentially capable of contesting power. The inflection point between these two models occurs around the year 1000, and not coincidentally this is the moment from which we see (1) progressive economic and population growth (until the crises of the 14th century), (2) a huge increase in sources due to increasing institutions with a vested interest in shaping society, and (3) a historian's urge to demarcate between the 'Early' and 'High' Middle Ages.

There are a few other interesting points I'd like to note. He challenges the notion—quite correctly, it seems to me—that aristocratic bodies in this period (parliaments, assemblies, diets, things, senates, corteses, councils, and so on) are precursors to democracy. I especially appreciate this position as there is too often a temptation to make one's period of study the one which birthed our world, which in this case would erase the importance of the 400 years between 1500 and 1900. He also admits that there is quite a lot we do not yet understand, especially with regards to economics.* Thus while the Rhine and Paris basins became much, much more productive during this period, we cannot yet explain why this occurred when and how it did. Similarly, it is unknown why early medieval kings were forced to give important administrative property and posts in perpetuity (seeding the local elites their descendants would need to bring in line), while later on they were able to use salaried officials to do equivalent work. Finally, Wickham strongly prioritizes the interplay of increasing state fiscal capacity and the escalating scale of warfare in explaining the trajectory Europe was on going into the Early Modern Period. This fits with my prior research on this period, and helps validate my current approach to teaching it.

While volume 4 of the Penguin History of Europe has yet to be published, this book serves as a bridge for the 150 years between Europe in the High Middle Ages and Christendom Destroyed, my likely next reading.

✭✭✭✭✰: The third volume of the Penguin History of Europe is another fine addition to the series. It covers Latin Europe* through the "High Middle Ages," a period it defines as 1000 - 1350. The starting date strikes one as more arbitrary than the ending one—while the 14th century is sharply divided by the Black Death of 1347-51,† nothing so clearly cleaves the 11th century from the 10th. Indeed, one thing I had never understood was how exactly one got from the Carolingian states of the 800s and 900s to the feudal arrangement of 1000. The answer provided by the juxtaposition of this volume and its predecessor, The Inheritance of Rome, is both less satisfying and more interesting than I had hoped: it just happened. There was no one moment where the rules of the game stabilized, where 'Francia' became 'France' and 'dux' became 'duke.' Rather, people who were born into complex and contingent social arrangements simply naturalized them. A man who was the third in his family to control a territory decided it must be his right to do so, and from then on others had to choose to either affirm or challenge that belief. It was precisely because the system's beginning was messy and ad-hoc that we later get the conflicts over whose rights had priority: pope vs. emperor, liege vs. vassal, serf vs. baron. 

William Chester Jordan splits Europe in the High Middle Ages into four parts for the four centuries it covers, devoting an average of a page per year (it is thus the shortest book in the series). Within each century, the topics are thematic: the cultural/intellectual, religious, social, and political are each covered separately, with the last given weight roughly equal to the other three put together. The opening chapter, "Christendom in the Year 1000," is one of the best works of history I have ever read. It is a materialist, bottom-up account of the framing facts of the period: peasants increased in number, brought new land under cultivation, adopted new technology, and struggled for freedom. The conflicts of high lords can only make sense within the context of these activities. Whenever Jordan returns to this style (whether for whole chapters, like "Social Structures" in Part III, or for sections, like in his coverage of Scandinavia in Part I), the period comes alive. The weaker sections tend to adopt a top-down, narrative style, losing explanatory power in the process. A useful example of this is the section on the "Reconquista" of Islamic Spain: Jordan tells us the story of the Cordoba Caliphate disintegrating into many smaller Taifas; of the Christian kingdoms rolling town-by-town down old Roman roads, cementing their gains with castles (hence, 'Castile'); of the depraved violence from both sides; and of the realities of governing mixed-religion communities post-conquest. Yet he does not provide an explanation for how the poorer, less populous, and technologically inferior Christians were victorious. The one explanation hinted at, of a more united Christian front, is explicitly undercut the only time it is actually addressed:

"Part of the problem on the Christian side was the unwillingness of Christian princes to abstain from quarrels among themselves... They fought as many wars with other Christian kingdoms as they did with the Almohad [Caliphate]."

So we are left to wonder why the Christians prevailed. Was there something about Spanish geopolitics which asymmetrically disadvantaged Al-Andalus? Were knights and castles a Christian monopoly? How come Christian states able to resurge from marginality while later on Muslim ones not? These questions are not answered, nor are they even explicitly posed. Across the book, several other questions of 'why' are elided with descriptions of 'what.' The decline of Byzantine power, the rise of Eastern European states, and the development of the North Sea economy all cry out for explanations beyond what Jordan provides.

In criticizing this volume for not being exhaustive, it should be clear that I am praising with faint condemnation. For such a short book, Jordan covers a tremendous amount of material in a manner which ranges from truly exceptional to merely interesting.

✭✭✭✭✭: The second volume of the Penguin History of Europe is a work I have been meaning to read for awhile. Chris Wickham is probably the leading expert on how the Roman World became medieval, epitomized by his 1000-page Framing the Early Middle Ages.* The Inheritance of Rome is his attempt to round out Framing's institutional, political, and economic analysis with the era's culture, art, and religion, while also presenting his previous work in form accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Wickham's approach—sometimes called "materialist" because it emphasizes the material pressures imposed by the economy—transforms the assumptions one carries about history. The Roman World did not end in one moment; rather, it was transformed into a system where people, goods, and ideas moved between regions progressively less often. Like most historians Wickham focuses on states, but refreshingly he justifies this choice by emphasizing the outsized role they play in every aspect of life: Byzantine trade revolved around central government administrative hubs, Islam spread in the wake of Arab conquest and not beyond, land-based systems of aristocracy were a result of Merovingian practices. Thus we get a history of Europe where individual rulers matter only insofar as they personally determined or exemplified a trend. This cuts down on what would otherwise be an interminable lists of names, battles, and intrigues. Furthermore, Wickham always keeps in mind the silent majority—peasants, women, and slaves—with whom his sympathies clearly lie. These groups and their ever-changing circumstances receive attention as far as the evidence (often archaeological rather than textual) allows, a choice sadly rare enough that it must be remarked upon. Beyond formal politics and economics, one of the best chapters in the book simply catalogues the connections and hierarchies of the post-Roman world-system as revealed through architecture. Wickham explains his approach to what he includes as follows:

"But, for all its distance from us, the early Middle Ages—the many different early medieval realities—are interesting. It is its interest I have tried most to bring out and make apparent in this book, not an overarching structural patterning for the period, a metahistorical narrative, most of the current examples of which, for the reasons outlined, are inventions."†

The books wraps up by noting six distinct breaks which characterize the era for the author: (1) Western Rome broke in the 5th century, (2) Eastern Rome broke in the 7th century, (3) Francia developed a discourse of moralized politics c. 780 - 880, (4) Carolingian World ended by 1000, (5) Abbasid Caliphate splintered c. 950, (6) Northern Europe adopted states on the model of their post-Roman neighbors c. 900s. In total, Wickham has produced a masterpiece of synthetic history which I expect to define the period for a generation or more.

✭✭✭✰✰: After reading Richard J. Evan's first two Reich books, I decided I wanted to read his The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815 - 1914, volume 7 in the Penguin History of Europe series. As I have also been meaning to read volume 6 in that series—Tim Blanning's Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 - 1815—I figured doing so first would help even out any gaps I may have before moving onto the 19th century. Volumes 5 (Christendom Destroyed), 3 (Europe in the High Middle Ages), and 2 (The Inheritance of Rome) have also been on my to-read list for quite some time [volume 4 is still forthcoming], and once one works themselves so near to the start of the series, it is hard to not just go whole hog. Thus my interest in the 19th century has led me to read The Birth of Classical Europe by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann. C'est la vie.

The work is a skillful introduction to the world of the Greeks and Romans: their polities, their culture, and their legacies. The authors make the excellent choice of tracing the history of their memory down to the present day. Not only is Athens of the 400s BCE covered, but so is its canonization by later Athens; it should perhaps strike us as odd that Athens was larger, richer, and safer under Roman rule than under Pericles but the latter is the "Golden Age." The book combines compelling analysis with illuminating examples. The way Gaulish wine sellers would stamp Roman pseudonyms onto their bottles to seem more cultured, the artificial boundary between Latin and Mexican Spanish, and the fraught transmission of the texts we rely on for sources all struck me as more important for understanding the world than the war between Antony and Octavian. These I have noted in order to use in future lesson plans.

The biggest weakness of this work is as a "History of Europe." While the authors argue that 'Europe' is a term invented by the Greeks to differentiate themselves from the stronger and richer countries of 'Asia' and therefore it is of extreme significance to show how this narrative developed (fair enough), this is done by massively over-emphasizing Greece and Rome at the expense of the rest of Europe (less defensible). More time is spent on Alexander the Great than all of Central and Northern Europe combined. A quick ctf + f of the ebook shows "Gree(k/ce)" yielding over a thousand results, while "German" less than 50. (Ten of which are about Hitler, not ancient Germania). "India," outside Europe but reached by Alexander in his conquests, gets 61 results; "Poland" just 4. While the authors do incorporate significant archaeology to flesh out the non-literate area (more than, say, Meredith), the vast majority of the narrative is spent on the Mediterranean World rather than the European Peninsula.

✭✭✰✰✰: This book is ostensibly a history of Africa since 3000 BCE. The first half covers Egypt, Carthage, the Christian and Islamic states, and finally colonization up to about 1870 (~97% of the chosen time period). The second half is a history of the continent through colonization, independence, and the post-independence years (the remaining ~3%). The choice of topics reflects the availability of written sources: Egypt is covered because their hieroglyphs have been preserved, Carthage because Roman histories cover them, Christian and Islamic kingdoms because they brought traditions of written record keeping. Therefore the vast swathes of continent where there are no extant writings get virtually no space. Two brief mentions of Great Zimbabwe (known through archaeology) and the Bantu Migration (known through linguistics) hint at what the book's first half could (and should) have been. For an example of this approach, look no further than By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean—Barry Cunliffe's history of Eurasia up through 1500 CE—which integrates genetics, anthropology, linguistics, material culture and oral tradition with written records to create a balanced history of the continent. Because Meredith limits himself to one kind of source, the perspective for most of the continent is restricted to explorers and colonists until well into the 20th century; thus, with rare exceptions, individual and not-very-important cogs in the machinery of European and Islamic empires get more description than entire African societies. The horrors of colonialism are discussed, but the details of post-independence Africa are elided with wishy-washy and unspecific statements of the kind which are not tolerated in modern histories of Europe or North America. His description of the Algerian War is characteristic: "In its final stages, the war in Algeria became a cauldron of terror and counter-terror carried out ruthlessly by both sides. By March 1962, one million Algerians, 18,000 French troops and 10,000 [French colonists] had died." A casual reader might take away 'both sides were bad,' while a more observant one might wonder why there is a 40-to-1 ratio in the number of casualties. Was France simply better armed? Were some of the Algerian casualties pro-French? Or was this actually an asymmetrical war, not a "both sides" affair? These are the vital facts of this war, yet the author doesn't address them. Would we accept in a history of World War II "the war between Germany and Poland became a cauldron of violence and counter-violence"? I don't think so. Africa deserves the same level of attention and care.

The most I can say in this book's favor is that the breadth is ambitious, the author is not explicitly racist, and that certain (mostly European) stories are told in an engaging way; the creation of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa for example was especially well done.

✭✭✭✭✰: This 3240-line poem tells the story of the warrior-prince Gahmuret. It is the first part of Wolfram von Escenbach's Parzival, a striking piece of Arthurian literature from the 13th century. Helen Mustard and Charles Passage understandably chose to drop the rhyme scheme of the original Middle High German in favor of English prose, though at times they keep an echo where unobtrusive.

Not entitled to an inheritance, Gahmuret leaves his brother's kingdom to win his fortune abroad, becoming renown from Spain to Baghdad. This journey must have resonated with Wolfram's audience: the common European culture (Latin Christianity, knights, and feudalism) was common precisely because generation after generation of aristocrats had colonized neighboring regions, bringing these institutions with them. I doubt it is a coincidence that Gahmuret's homeland is Anjou, the core from which the knightly diaspora spread. (See 'Map')

Gahmuret is a valiant warrior, gaining two damsels through his strength of arms. The first is Belacane, widowed Queen of Zazamanc. Of her Wolfram confesses, "If there is anything brighter than daylight—the queen in no way resembled it. A woman’s manner she did have, and was on other counts worthy of a knight, but she was un­like a dewy rose: her complexion was black of hue." Gahmuret saves her capital from two besieging armies, obtaining her heart and kingdom in the process. After giving away the booty of conquest and impregnating his new wife, he finds "no knightly activity" left for him with her. He sneaks out and leaves a—frankly, quite rude—note to his Muslim wife: "Lady, if you will receive baptism, you may yet win me back."

His second wife, Herzeloyde, is a fellow Angevin. He wins her hand and three(!) kingdoms in a tournament against several other famous lords (including Utepandragun of Britain, father of King Arthur). After leaving her pregnant with the future Parzival, Gahmuret again departs, this time to assist his old ally the Caliph ("Baruch") of Islam. In this he dies, having "Achievements enough... already when his manly courage took him over seas to face battle." A modern reader might condemn Gahmuret for his treatment of his wives, but to Wolfram's contemporaries he is an ideal knight; 'chivalry' then meant not courtesy but demonstrated martial prowess. Gahmuret is entitled to the women (and political power they bring) not by what he does with them (for he is neither a good husband nor a good king), but by the mere fact he won them. Yet the story also nuances a medieval stereotype: despite being written at the height of the crusades, the Muslims lords are depicted as equally virtuous counterparts to Christian knights. If Gahmuret fails to stay faithful to his Muslim wife, it is not because any Muslim failed to stay faithful to him. Thus the story is not a simple 'Christian versus Muslim' morality tale, but an intertwining web of obligation, fidelity, wanderlust, and chivalry. Indeed, Gahmuret gives his life protecting the leader of Islam. The sheer breadth and depth of this story lets the reader know that while 'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,' that realm is still inhabited by people who fought, mourned, held or broke faith, wondered, loved and were loved, and hoped for something better.

✭✭✭✭✰: This is the second volume in Richard J. Evans' "Third Reich" trilogy, chronicling the six years between Hitler's ascent to power in 1933 and the beginning of war with Poland, France and Britain in 1939. It is divided into seven sections—each a little over 100 pages—documenting a different aspect of the Third Reich: (1) Policing & Repression, (2) Culture & Propaganda, (3) Religion & Education, (4) Economics, (5) Society & Class, (6) Racism, and (7) International Policy. Thus, one experiences the atrocity of Nazi rule seven distinct times, each concluding with the mutilation of the status quo ante.

Evans is all about nuance: the individual story gets as much attention as national statistics, and he evenhandedly spotlights the experiences of the everyman, the important party leader, and the obscure crank. Two diarists he is fond of quoting (Luise Solmitz and Victor Klemperer) are conservative nationalists who, despite otherwise supporting Hitler, find themselves targeted by the anti-Jewish laws. Their quotes can therefore do double work by both illuminating the motivations for Nazism as well as the hell of anti-Jewish repression.

The Nazis wished to be seen as an undifferentiated mass under the military discipline of the Führer (Leni Riefenstahl depicts them such in Triumph of the Will), but in reality they were a deeply conflicted group constantly engaged in turf wars over who would get to mold German society. Indeed, the Social Darwinist aspect of their ideology vindicated the winner as ipso facto more vital. Evans shows that the deciding factor in the outcome of these conflicts, in education, economy, medicine, and foreign policy, was whether it would assist in German military domination of Europe and the destruction Jewry. This allows us to uncover what Nazism actually was: it was not a reactionary rejection of modernity (for it eagerly embraced new technology), nor a sort of mutated national communism (for it was more than happy to allow non-Jewish capitalists to retain or even grow their property), nor a cynical power grab by elites who knew better (for why risk everything on an unnecessary war in 1939?). All other professed goals (to abolish status distinctions, to strengthen or weaken the church, to save the German economy) were emphasized or shunted aside as required in order to create an Aryan racial order. This goes with the thesis of Wages of Destruction (below), that the militaristic and antisemitic aspects of Nazism are (1) the core of the ideology and (2) inseparable from one another. Indeed, Tooze gets mentioned in the Acknowledgements for reading an early draft of Power, and Wages, published just the next year, was no doubt influenced by it.

This is widely agreed to be the weakest volume in the trilogy, and even if that is so, it is still a monumental work of scholarship about a critical period in world history.

✭✭✭✭✰: No historian has had a larger influence on me than Eric Hobsbawm, whose Age of Revolution made me at age 18 realize just how little I knew. Age of Extremes finishes the story Revolution began: the dual forces of industrial capitalism and political radicalism, the great convergence of Manchester and Paris, have resolved itself not in his hoped for victory of communism (Hobsbawm stubbornly remained a card carrier party member for 60 years, letting it lapse only when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991), but instead in the neoliberal democratic capitalism which Francis Fukuyama christened "The End of History." Reading a book by someone both brilliant and wrong, reflecting on a century filled with disastrously wrong individuals, is really quite something. When Hobsbawm refers to those on the British left who "was eventually to admit that some of the ruthless shocks imposed on the British economy by Mrs. Thatcher had probably been necessary," he actually is admitting his own error. Through such little asides, he traces how not only global politics, economics, and culture evolved (a task which he does quite masterfully), but also—as far a historian can do so—what people's unconscious assumptions about the world were. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union felt like the future; in the 1990s, it felt like There Is No Alternative. When Hobsbawm's own personal politics do directly appear in the text, they complement rather than dominate the narrative. One of the most insightful passages in the book begins with this pugnacious claim: "It is the paradox of the USSR that, in its death, it provided one of the strongest arguments for the analysis of Karl Marx."

It is sad to finally finish this series which has meant so much to me; I have read these books over such varied parts of my life that their author feels an old companion. Still, he has 26 books listed on Wikipedia which I have not read (and in truth, I have not fully understood the six others either), so whenever I wish I can again spend another afternoon with him.

✭✭✭✭✭: "We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?" -Sen. Bobby Kennedy

After the shocking 1965 murder of 500,000 communists and alleged communists by the Indonesian military, 'Jakarta' became a byword for a bundle of techniques which could terrorize a formerly democratic society into submission. Bevins demonstrates through a masterful intertwining of interviews and history how "Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam" are still haunted in one way or another by the extraordinary violence the U.S. assisted local strongmen in committing during the Cold War. His thesis, that "this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today," seems undeniable given the evidence the author musters, and stands in direct contrast to the US' own understanding of the last century.

✭✭✭✭✭: By 1931, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler had come to the same conclusion: the United States was not only the most powerful country in the world, it was so powerful that soon no power or even alliance of powers would be able to resist it. While this observation led Churchill to tie Britain's fate to that of the USA, Hitler—believing America to be a pawn of "world Jewry"—decided to drive east in "the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism." The analogy to the United States' own expansion was explicit: Hitler hoped the Volga would prove to be a German "Mississippi," and the indigenous Slavs would have to be exterminated like "Red Indians." The genocidal logic reached its apex in der Hungerplan, a stunning attempt to by divert the food of 30 million Eastern Europeans towards other uses, clearing the land for German settlement. The material and the ideological are inseparable in the Nazi decision for war: Slavs and Jews must be exterminated in order to secure German economic power, and German economic power is necessary to ward off future assaults by Slavs and Jews.

The fact that the Nazis got as far as they did can, in Tooze's argument, be explained by two factors: firstly, the massive head-start in German war materiel ("the Third Reich shifted more resources in peacetime into military uses than any other capitalist regime in history"), and secondly, the unforeseen success of the blitzkrieg against France. Once the Nazis failed to recreate 1940 in its 1941 anti-Soviet offensive, the sheer quantity of production of the allies vis-à-vis Germany meant inevitable defeat.* It is interesting to note that post-war Germany, or at least the western part, did undergo the fate Hitler feared: it became perpetually dominated by the United States. And for the average German, life has never been better.

✭✭✭✭✰: This is the first book of Richard J. Evans' "Third Reich" trilogy. Evans is notable for having previously investigated the half-century prior to the Nazis in a series of social histories on Germany: Feminists (1976), Politics (1978), Family (1981), Working-Class (1982), Peasantry (1986), Unemployed (1987), Socialists & Pacifists (1987), Death (1987), Underworld (1988), Bourgeoisie (1990), and Capital Punishment (1996). This allows him unmatched insight how the Wilhelmine and Weimar regimes shaped Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. His story is not simple: parts of every group were brought into the Nazis constellation, though not at once and never evenly. Protestants were more drawn to the nationalist Prussian ideal than Catholics, and the working classes, with strong socialist and communist trade-unions to keep them in-line, were perhaps only 1/3rd or 1/4th as likely as peasants to vote for Hitler.

The style is narrative rather than analytical, but still presents plausible explanations for: (1) why a preponderance of power turned against Weimar democracy; (2) why the alternative was to the Right and not the Left; (3) how the Nazis became dominant within the Hindenburg-von Papen-Hitler alliance that decapitated Weimar democracy; and (4) how the Nazis stopped the ricochet Germany had experienced since 1918 (namely, through mass suppression). His story ends in 1933, with the regime publicly gloating about the "concentration camps" into which they have thrown Communists, Social Democrats, and other perceived enemies of the "Nationalist Revolution."

✭✭✭✰✰: La Reine étranglée (English: "The Strangled Queen") picks up where Le Roi de fer ends: Philip, who ruled as "the Iron King" for 30 years, is replaced by his insecure son Louis "the Stubborn." This makes Louis' wife, Margaret of Burgundy, queen. Unfortunately for the realm, the paternity of their only child is in question after Margaret was caught in an affair. Thus, the way to ensure a peaceful succession is for Louis to find a new wife. The title gives away the exciting conclusion: after Margaret's final refusal to grant an annulment, she is assassinated in the name of male pride and state power.

This book was a good read, but was a little too similar to the previous volume: Robert of Artois schemes, Guccio realizes that love is worth more than money, and France's ruling circle inches closer to civil war.

✭✭✭✭✭: Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, was the best selling book in the history of Harvard University Press. Anecdotally, I can report that the public library I borrowed it from had over ten copies on its shelf. That work launched a debate on inequality, capitalism, and democracy's future (Piketty's prior research popularized the idea of "the 1%"). This book is somehow both bigger in scope and even better executed than Capital. Piketty presents his analysis for how different "ideologies" of property (including feudalism, slavery, capitalism, and 20th-century communism) have succeeded or failed to create human flourishing throughout history.

The classic complaint against Piketty, that his books are too long, is fair—Capital & Ideology is nearly 1200 pages, dwarfing Capital's 700 pages, a book on its own which was considered Too Long. Yet every section is individually quite readable, and I for one would prefer more Piketty rather than less.

✭✭✭✰✰: Le Roi de fer (English: "The Iron King") is the first book in Les Rois maudits (English: "The Accursed Kings"), a historical fiction series explores the collapse of France's Capetian dynasty in the lead-up to the 100 Years War. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare's eight play Richard-Henry sequence will know that England came very close to conquering their southern neighbor in the 14th century, despite France having perhaps 3 - 5 times the population and wealth of England. In this first volume Druon, a historian of medieval France, shows how the chivalric ideal was already being eroded by the twin forces of the rising merchant class (personified by the Tuscan bankers) and growing capacity of the central state.

Beyond the engaging and largely-accurate history, I found the French language to be at an appropriate level for myself—I was able to follow the plot while still learning new words every chapter.

✭✭✭✰✰: This book chronicles the cultural changes Europe underwent in the early 20th century, with the goal of demonstrating that the Great War of 1914 - 1918 was a continuation of existing trends rather than a sharp break. The first few chapters—covering the intersection of technology, economics, and social values—are especially strong, while the later sections become more of a list of interesting cranks. The politics of the period are intentionally under-emphasized, but Blom might have benefited from, for example, contrasting the coverage of the murder Gaston Calmette with that of Jean Jaurès in order to further his argument that mass culture was changing into one capable of waging total war upon itself.

✭✭✭✰✰: I was recommended this book (English: "A Court of Thorns and Roses") by a student, and, wishing to improve my French, I decided to purchase a translation in that language. Keeping in mind that I am not the target audience for this book, I would evaluate it as 'fine' and 'slightly worse than Twilight.' It is a YA supernatural story where the girl is whisked to the Fairy Realm by a mysterious and brooding lord, only to find herself falling in love with him. Still, the book becomes more interesting in the last third, and I can at least say my French improved markedly.

✭✭✭✭✰ : This is a deceptionally good book, and has much more going on than the typical Very Short Introduction. Barry Cunliffe is one of the great masters of pre-history, having written recent books on the Scythians and "The Birth of Eurasia." Here he continues with an exploration of the ancient Celt's most famous caste: the druids. He excels in his careful use of evidence, methodically distinguishing ancient histories, archaeological data, medieval oral tradition, and modern myth in order to understand how druids evolved over centuries, both as a lived institution and as a remembered ideal.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is one of the best books I have ever read. Walter Scheidel adds a series of arguments to the Great Divergence debate which seem eminently plausible: (1) Eurasian Empires tend to be built in response to dangers from the steppe; (2) Western Europe does not face that danger; (3) Empires are conducive to "Smithian Growth" but not paradigm-shifting growth; (4) Leaving the pre-industrial Malthusian trap requires a series of paradigm shifts, not mere Smithian Growth. Taken together, this amounts to a compelling explanation of why sustained growth took off in Western Europe 1500 - 1800, not anywhere else in Eurasia.

✭✭✭✰✰: One of the great philosophers writing his version of the field's history. Of course, that makes him far from an objective critic.

Robert Paul Wolff tells a story about meeting Russell when he was a 19 year-old grad student at Harvard, and the British aristocrat asked Wolff what philosophy he has been reading. Wolff told him: Kant's Critique of Practical Reason—to which a smirking Russell rejoined, "oh, so you enjoy fiction then."