Rindis.com

Along with all the other cheap ebook reprints out there, there is a company (unnamed, so far as I can tell), who specializes in distributing the files from Project Gutenberg in ebook format (with a fairly distinctive two-tone cover pattern). This means that unlike the other two companies I’ve dealt with recently, the number of typos is low, but there are still formatting glitches. Notably, all the page number tags in the Gutenberg files are still in-line here. (Since there are notes that reference these pages, it is of use.) Occasionally, the line breaks of the original file have not been properly removed, but this is a handful of times, and generally the formatting is good.

This particular book was originally published in in French in the late 18th century, and given here in a 1840 translation, which means it is somewhat… dated. (Especially as the accepted Anglicizations of the names have changed quite a bit.) The author’s name was only given as “Florian”, which took some investigation to find out was Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian.

At any rate, it’s not a bad book, and is one of the first Western works to take a more sympathetic view of Moorish civilization (not entirely sympathetic, however). In fact, it is two works in one, as the final part of the book is a separate overview of Muslim history in general by “Rev S. Greene” (included in the 1840 book). That said, unless you’re interested in the historiography of Spain, there must be better things to read, though I don’t know what they would be (which is why I got this in the first place).

Peter S. Wells’ book Barbarians to Angels is a look at the Dark Ages in the ‘cultural continuity’ tradition that started in the 1970s. It is mostly aimed at dispelling the extremely bleak view of post-Roman history taken by the early Humanists to Gibbon and through most of the twentieth century..

And it’s a certainty that things weren’t as bad as they represented them. However, the arguments presented that the post-Roman world continued without major disruptions are often nebulous, ill-supported, and lacking any degree of detail.

The strongest assertions are with the continuance with cities. The older view generally asserts that post-Roman cities were abandoned, or greatly reduced in size. Wells talks about what archaeology has found in several cities throughout Europe that show these cities did not show in disruption in the post-Roman era, as well as several sites outside the Roman world that developed in this time frame. However, one city did indeed shrink massively in this period (Rome itself), and there’s no discussion of if there are any cities from that period where there has been a conspicuous absence of any meaningful finds. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but the comparison would provide a useful baseline for better theorizing.

Still, archaeology is the best parts of the book, and I wish he had gone into more detail about what has been found. New finds are made all the time, and this book does touch on several more recent ones. I think a more systematic examination would have helped develop his argument much better. As it is, he shows that there were new sites, outside the Roman world (in the Baltics) that were developing, and trading. And while that does support his refrain that Europe did not turn into a howling wilderness, it does speak to the potential of large economic shifts, which would disrupt ordinary life.

Moreover, Wells asserts at one point that the finds of exotic luxury goods in graves and the like disproves that trade declined in the post-Roman period. No, it only shows that luxury goods continued to be traded; it says nothing about bulk non-luxury goods, the part that only sees trade when there is a well-established infrastructure in place.

In the end, I suppose I was expecting a more scholarly work, while this is really a very introductory text. It is also aimed at traditional rut of learning about the period, which is not where I am. It’s not a bad book, but not what I’m looking for.