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The leading international forum for literary culture

Ian Wood

THE MODERN ORIGINS OF THE

EARLY MIDDLE AGES

374pp. Oxford University Press. 65.

978 0 19 965048 4

Published: 2 July 2014

Huns besieging Aquileia, from The Chronicon Pictum,

also referred to as the Chronica Hungarorum (14th

century)

Why the Middle Ages are still with usNICHOLAS VINCENT

T he starting point for this survey of modern approaches to the

early Middle Ages is a statement attributed in 2003 to the then

education secretary, Charles Clarke: I dont mind there being

some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is

no reason for the state to pay for them. Rarely can a modern

politician have stepped into so stinking a medieval dunghill. AsIan Wood reveals in this trenchant and wide-ranging survey,

controversy over the early Middle Ages is no mere ornament. On

the contrary, in all sorts of ways nationalistic, social, political,

religious and (most alarmingly) racial the period from AD 400

to 700 remains central to the modern European sense of identity.

In the nineteenth century, Piedmont, Naples and France all

appointed early medievalists as prime ministers. Since then, early

medieval problems Schleswig-Holstein, AlsaceLorraine,

Belgium, more recently Yugoslavia have resisted even the

sleekest of modern political solutions.

From the eighteenth century onwards, long before Edward Gibbon

came trawling in their wake, French historians had made an

intellectual cock-fight of the fifth and sixth centuries. Both the

causes and the consequences of Romes fall became fiercely

controversial. Were kingship and the French state inherent in the

barbarian conquests, or merely copied by barbarians from the

Roman past? Were the Germanic invaders the ancestors of the

modern third estate, or an aristocratic elite, harbingers of noble

privilege and the Fronde? Were they free men (Franks/franci), as Tacitus had supposed them to be, or locust-like

enslavers of the previously free citizens of Rome? And what role did religion play in all this? Was the adoption ofChristianity, as Gibbon suggested in one of his few entirely original contributions, the cause of the fall of Rome? Or was

it a means by which classical civilization was rescued from extinction? By the 1770s, when Gibbon came to spread his

magniloquent and synthesizing net, the germ of these ideas and many more had already escaped the intellectual bell

jar. They were inhaled even by Louis XVI. Posing as his secretary Leclerc de Septchnes, it was perhaps Louis who

made the first French translation of the opening chapters of GibbonsDecline and Fall.

Revolution and Napoleon posed new problems. Thomas Jefferson suggested that Hengest and Horsa be portrayed on

the seal of the newly independent United States, as symbols of Saxon victory over imperial tyranny. Faced with such

presumption, how were modern empires, not least the British colonies, to be preserved against the fate of Rome? Just

as Napoleon clothed himself as a medieval king, crowned with the iron crown of Lombardy, in robes strewn with

Merovingian bees, so his opponents, not least Madame de Stal, sought to vilify him as Attila, barbarian scourge of the

West. In Italy, ManzonisAdelchi of 1822, following in the wake of Walter ScottsIvanhoe, encouraged a view of


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conquerors as outsiders to peoples or proto-nations ever afterwards subject to foreign or aristocratic domination. East

of the Rhine, resistance to Napoleon inspired a generation of scholars determined to prove Germanic continuity,

asserting German custom as an alternative to French manners or the Napoleonic Code. This resulted, as early as 1819,

in the foundation of the body responsible for theMonumenta Germaniae Historica, with its mottoSanctus amor

patriae dat animum (Holy love of the Fatherland supplies soul). Yet in its early years this was based in Hanover,

whose English King, George IV, together with the Russian Tsar, proved a more generous patron than either the King of

Prussia or the Austrian Emperor.

With this new nationalist agenda came a search not only for political but for racial origins. Ethnogenesis, the study of

the emergence of peoples and their languages and laws, went hand in hand with a willingness to identify racial

characteristics. The rot started here as early as the 1780s in the work of the Englishman, Thomas Pinkerton,

determined to distinguish noble Teuton from degenerate Celt. Such thinking informed not only the intellectually

respectable Edward Augustus Freeman, but crackpots and fanatics. It meant that, after the German defeat in 1918,

early medieval history played an ever more sinister role in race theory, claims to ancestral living space and the work

of those such as Karl August Eckhardt, scholarly editor ofLex Sallica for theMonumenta, yet also an SS

Sturmbannfhrer, contributor to a Festschrift of 1941 for Heinrich Himmler.

Even before this, as early as the 1870s, the experience of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war led Fustel de Coulanges,

first professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne, to question whether the Germans had ever truly conquered France.The barbarian conquests, he argued, were ultimately an irrelevance, masking a far more gradual process of Teutonic

assimilation to Gallo-Roman ways. Alsace was crucial to the formation of many French medievalists, not least Marc

Bloch, himself of Alsatian- Jewish descent, after 1918 appointed lecturer at the newly de-Germanized University of

Strasbourg. It was these same Franco-German tensions that led Henri Pirenne to posit his own famous thesis on the

fall of Rome. Roman civilization, Pirenne argued, did not end abruptly in the fifth century, but survived until at least

the seventh. It was brought to an end not by German conquest but by the rise of Islam, closing off the Mediterranean to

northern trade.

Woods exposition of these theories is penetrating and full of insight. He dispels any idea that medieval history is

irrelevant or merely ornamental. At the same time, his treatment is highly, sometimes unnecessarily selective. Wood

himself proclaims his desire to follow Michel Foucault in the exploration of dominant discourses. But how is

dominance to be distinguished from dull tradition or the merely picturesque?

To begin with the example of the Church. Wood traces the role that Christian apologetics have played in the debate

over the fall of Rome, but he does so without sufficient attention to inter-denominational rivalry. As a result, he misses

the fact that both in France (where such issues were crucial to the defence of the Gallican establishment) and in the

Protestant north (where there was a desire to prove descent from pure, Teutonic proto-Lutherans) this was far more

than a question of belief versus scepticism. Bede, for example, was crucial to the Gallican cause, not least because he

preserved letters of Pope Gregory instructing the new English mission to follow the liturgy of either the Roman church

or the Church of Gaul. Gallicanism also contributed, after 1815, to the explosion of enthusiasm in France for local or

regional histories, often focused on a single saint or diocese. Here, by confining himself to the discourse onnationhood, Wood misses another significant theme. The history of the early Middle Ages was taught, beyond Paris

and Berlin, in intensely local ways, as the history of Armorica or Normandy, Burgundy or Pomerania. Many of these

histories disputed what was viewed, as early as the nineteenth-century, as the false modern perspective of statist

metropolitanism.

Various discourses are silenced altogether. Thus there is nothing here on Friedrich Klopstock and the veneration of

Hermann and the Teutoburg forest (site of a famous Germanic victory over Rome), nor on Sabine Baring-Gould and

the Glastonbury legends, nor indeed on King Arthur as model of all things from Tennysonian chivalry, via Wagnerian

angst, to doomed Celtic heroism. Intellectual historians might expect the study of Boethius, or Gildas, or Isidore to

loom rather larger. There are other remarkable omissions, none more so than the sociological historicism of Engels.

There is no Oswald Spengler, and no Arnold Toynbee. Sir Henry Maine played a crucial role not only in revolutionizing

legal anthropology, but in introducing his English readers to ideas of communal property ownership


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(Markgenossenschaft), influenced not only by German jurists such as Georg Von Maurer but by Maines personal

experience of legal administration in India. Wood refers to him to only once, and misleadingly, as Sumner Maine.

Among those here termed Catholic revivalists, Christopher Dawson is considered in detail, but largely, one suspects,

because of his significance to the thinking of Peter Brown. By contrast, there is nothing on Cuthbert Butler, nothing on

Charles Plummer and the Irish saints, nothing on Hippolyte Delehaye, the Bollandists, or the opening up of

hagiography as a source of social and political insight. Wood contributes a fascinating account of Pirennes anti-

Germanism, but without mentioning the death of Pirennes son, killed fighting the Germans on the Yser in October

1914. He notes the significance of Geoffrey de Ste Croix to the discourse of class struggle, but without acknowledgingthat slavery and its consequences were crucial to Frank Walbanks account of the fall of Rome, published as early as

1946, in a book influenced not just by Marxism but by Liverpool, a city that had grown rich from the slave trade.

But let us not make the definitive the enemy of the good. The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Agesis a splendid

survey, full of new and interesting things. It will enlighten the young and infuriate their elders, not least those of

Marxist persuasion. It is a pleasure to read.

Nicholas Vincentis Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia and the author of A Brief History

of Britain 10661485, which was published in 2011.

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