Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 7/6/2014

restorationPeter Heather’s The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders is far inferior to his two earlier books, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. The substantive problem is that unlike the first two works this capstone of his scholarly trilogy lacks focus and coherency. There isn’t a very strong story threading together the disparate elements. The restoration of Rome that Heather alludes to in the title is the Papacy of the high medieval period, after 1200 or so. His story then has tie together Theodoric’s dominion in 6th century Italy, as well as Justinian’s Byzantium, and the long period between the rise of Islam and the Crusades. Because of considerations of space there are enormous lacunae in the book, as it is basically a history of aspects of late antiquity which bleeds over into the middle ages. A minor stylistic demerit The Restoration of Rome which I also found grating was the use of British English idiom in some passages. I have to go to online dictionaries to understand some allusions and references, and I wonder what I may have missed. Luckily I’ve already transitioned to reading Azar Gat’s Nations, which seems a more substantive and well thought out book.

Of course there are elements of Heather’s new book which are interesting or useful in attempting to understand general historical and cultural principles. For example, he presents a good deal of information which suggests that medieval forgeries such as the Donation of Constantine were written not in Rome for the Popes, but rather in northern Europe for local bishops. Eventually these documents were leveraged in the ideological program of the high medieval Papacy, but that was a downstream consequence of genuinely local exigencies which triggered these productions. No doubt this specific case illustrates general dynamic.

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