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wwatts1734's review against another edition
2.0
This book is less a historical treatise and more of a series of lectures that Trevor-Roper gave to the BBC back in the early 1960s. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a British historian who was famous for writing a book on the last days of Hitler. The famous English historian Arnold Toynbee once famously chided Trevor-Roper with being excessively sarcastic and flippant in his writings. The great English writer Evelyn Waugh once criticized Trevor-Roper for his anti-Catholic bias. Unfortunately, both of these vices are eminently present in "The Rise of Christian Europe."
Overall I was very disappointed with this book. While the author brings up some interesting points, his bias is so obvious that I felt like I was reading a work of propaganda, not a work of scholarship. Trevor-Roper does not reference any of the outstanding works of Medieval History that had been published up until that point in the 20th Century. Instead he quotes two authorities, Sir Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, both of whom lived in the 18th century and neither of them known for being experts in medieval history. The only other source that he quotes is the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, a source that is notable not only because he lived within 100 years of the publication of this work, but because he is not a prominent anti-Catholic.
In his chapter on the Crusades, the author seems to think that St. Dominic was a reformed Albigensian and that St. Francis of Assisi was a rehabilitated Waldense. He said that bishops like St. Augustine of Hippo were equal in status to the Pope. Is that true? If you read the letters of St. Augustine it is obvious that St. Augustine did not think so. In his chapter on the 12th Century renaissance the author says that the Pope hated the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick I because Fredrick insisted on founding educational institutions. Which is interesting because the Church during this same period founded universities such as Oxford, the Sorbonne and the Jagiellonian University in Poland. As you can tell, the author is a little challenged when it comes to the history of the Middle Ages. It is always a shame when a historian writes a work about a people or nation for which the author has nothing but contempt.
Despite all of the flaws that I outlined above, the author has some interesting things to say, especially about the continuation of Roman trade and emigration patterns during the sixth and seventh centuries and the role of the rise of Islam and the Viking raids on the rise of feudalism. His prose is interesting and very readable. Despite this, I would not recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the history of Europe during the Middle Ages.
Overall I was very disappointed with this book. While the author brings up some interesting points, his bias is so obvious that I felt like I was reading a work of propaganda, not a work of scholarship. Trevor-Roper does not reference any of the outstanding works of Medieval History that had been published up until that point in the 20th Century. Instead he quotes two authorities, Sir Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, both of whom lived in the 18th century and neither of them known for being experts in medieval history. The only other source that he quotes is the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, a source that is notable not only because he lived within 100 years of the publication of this work, but because he is not a prominent anti-Catholic.
In his chapter on the Crusades, the author seems to think that St. Dominic was a reformed Albigensian and that St. Francis of Assisi was a rehabilitated Waldense. He said that bishops like St. Augustine of Hippo were equal in status to the Pope. Is that true? If you read the letters of St. Augustine it is obvious that St. Augustine did not think so. In his chapter on the 12th Century renaissance the author says that the Pope hated the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick I because Fredrick insisted on founding educational institutions. Which is interesting because the Church during this same period founded universities such as Oxford, the Sorbonne and the Jagiellonian University in Poland. As you can tell, the author is a little challenged when it comes to the history of the Middle Ages. It is always a shame when a historian writes a work about a people or nation for which the author has nothing but contempt.
Despite all of the flaws that I outlined above, the author has some interesting things to say, especially about the continuation of Roman trade and emigration patterns during the sixth and seventh centuries and the role of the rise of Islam and the Viking raids on the rise of feudalism. His prose is interesting and very readable. Despite this, I would not recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the history of Europe during the Middle Ages.
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