And so, for a thousand inky, gloomy years, a great shadow loomed above Europe, stubbornly hanging there, blocking the sun of learning and erudition, stifling thought and action, casting humankind into a vast, impenetrable darkness that gave the epoch its name. The Dark Ages were a blight upon the earth.
Except maybe they weren’t.
Now two scholars, representing deep research and reflecting the disruptive zeitgeist of our own age, have turned the history of Medieval Europe on its head, seeking to reverse centuries of conventional belief about a period that we thought, until about yesterday, was mired in superstition, ignorance and hopelessness. Also plague.
The effort of Matthew Gabriele, chair of the department of religion and culture at Virginia Tech, and David M. Perry, a medieval historian at the University of Minnesota, is the latest entry in the derby to take a fresh look at history — and at our intellectual prejudices. It follows by only six weeks the publication of the massive “The Dawn of Everything,” in which David Wengrow and the late David Graeber argue that our perceptions of the past hundreds of thousands of years are narrow and narrow-minded, ignorant and at base incorrect.
Here Gabriele and Perry offer an imaginative and supremely inviting look at the Dark Ages, which they ingeniously repackage as the “Bright Ages.” They aren’t suffering from an intellectual form of achromatopsia, the rare visual defect where individuals can only see black and white. There are plenty of brilliant colors in this volume along with (lest us not forget) the moments of extreme darkness.
But in a brisk book that illuminates an enormous historical period — a thousand years in 336 pages: what a relief! — they shine a light on an age they argue is misunderstood and mischaracterized. And here the “light” metaphors metastasize: shimmering stars, gleaming tiles, brilliant jewels, sun-dappled towers, divine light, glistening snow, candles — and these are only from the chapter titles.
In an age of reckoning but also of revisionism, this was a predictable (and welcome) development. History, after all, isn’t static; one of the ironies of life is that the past is always changing. There is a certain satisfaction in learning — why didn’t we think of this when we were fed the old dark narrative? — that the human condition is the one thing that doesn’t change. And so the Gabriele/Perry thesis is a congenial one, especially when expressed this way:
“The Bright Ages contain the beauty and light of stained glass in the high ceilings of the cathedral, the blood and sweat of the people who built them, the golden relics of the Church, the acts of charity and devotion by people of deep faith, but also the wars fought over ideas of the sacred, the scorched flesh of the heretics burned in the name of intolerance and fear.”
This argument is incandescent and ultimately intoxicating, for as the chapters progress, it dawns — oops, another “light” metaphor — on the reader that those who lived in this period were more conventional than the cardboard figures of schoolday narratives, that they were composed of unbounded good along with unimaginable evil or were, if we dare trip the light fantastic verbally, possessed of brilliance and darkness. They were, in essence, human. “Premodern people,” the scholars argue, “were just as complex and sophisticated as any who followed.”
And then some. This was a time when Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Mecca flourished — the contemporary reader might think of San Francisco, Toronto, Paris and Beijing and wonder if our age matches theirs. Because that’s not all. The light — here we go again — also shined on Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba.
Trade flourished, great migrations spread, new ways of thinking evolved and then were overtaken by fresh new ideas. Much of this is lost in our hazy view of the Dark Ages, when we are blind to the light of the inquiry, imagination and innovation that thrived in those centuries. Gabriele and Perry have lit a candle as they cursed the darkness.
This book is the medieval equivalent of a Europass through a continent undergoing expansive change. Britain, once thought to be a remote cultural island, now is revealed to be an island colony “filled with people from at least three continents, with men, women, and children who likely spoke a variety of languages.” In France, where constant warfare existed along with growing concern for domestic happiness, “there is every indication that Charlemagne took his charge as a religious leader seriously, and that he was deeply concerned about the spiritual as well as the material well-being of his followers.”
And then there were the Vikings, admittedly ferocious warriors. But not only that. “Their society featured significant gender parity, at least in key parts of society,” the authors argue. “Their cities were vibrant hubs of mercantile exchange. Their men were snazzy dressers.’’
Some of the light, to be sure, came from the flames of burning books. But it also was a period where great cathedrals were erected for the glory of God, though always with consideration of light, for, as the authors argue, “‘allowing that sunlight inside, allowing an interior to gleam, was to capture something of the divine.” And while it is difficult, especially in our time, to see the bright side of the Black Death, the authors uncover “plenty of examples of priests, rabbis, and imams staying with their communities, offering what comfort they could to the afflicted.”
In the end, the lesson here is not to be sure of what we thought we knew — and to be humble about our own time. “We live, today, with the legacy of all this in our own dark age,” the authors remind us. “White supremacists continue to reach back to medieval European history as a way to tell a story about whiteness, a sense of lost (but imagined) masculinity, and the need to shed blood.” True enough, from authors who have helped us shed an antiquated view of the complex period that followed antiquity.
THE BRIGHT AGES: A New History of Medieval Europe
By Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry
Harper, 336 pages, $29.99
David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is a nationally syndicated columnist.