336 - AD 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse

AD 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse

By Richard Erdoes

San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1988. 228 Pp. $19.95.

Popularizing history has a legitimate place in the world of culture and learning. Few readers intrigued by past events, personalities, and cultures have the leisure or linguistic skills to read the original sources for themselves or to pursue research in scholarly journals. In recent years, French medieval historians (Le Goff, Duby, Le Roy Ladurie, and many others) have made popularizing histories central to the French booktrade (and, in translation, to the American undergraduate classroom). But for popularizing history to work, it must meet two criteria. It must be rooted in the sources, and it must convey an authentic sense of the "otherness" of a past culture. This book, sadly, fails on both counts. The problem lies not in the choice of topic. Europe in the later tenth century was truly an interesting place, full of fascinating personalities and the setting for the first stages of a dramatic reawakening. Moreover, Pope Gerbert, the Ottonian kings of Germany, the newly converted Slavs and Scandinavians, the Jews and Muslims of Spain, and so much more-all truly worthy of wider note-have rarely entered into American historical consciousness. The book is also written in a lively, if not sensational, style. But it will not do. Erdoes has not gone back to the sources for himself and has no real sense of how to read, interpret, or use the ones that he has culled out of other people's books. Among the striking omissions from his bibliography, given his emphasis upon Gerbert, is a full translation of the pope's letters into English, which the interested reader might far better spend his or her time persuing. Erdoes also fails to convey any sense for the "otherness" of Europe in the tenth century. The book is replete with howling errors and anachronisms, which it would serve no purpose to begin to list. The author's intentions were wholly otherwise: to tell contemporary readers in a rather sensational way that earlier peoples have also "lived at the brink." This critique of a "harmless" book may sound like the petty carping of a professional medievalist. It is rather the expression of genuine disappointment at a good opportunity lost.

JOHN VAN ENGEN

University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana