January 22, 2008
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The Year in Books
I finished the first of my “List” books today.
If you recall (or even if you don’t), I have a list of ten books in each of ten categories that I’m interested in reading this year.
My first finished book is from Category 4: Medieval and Renaissance History. I finally finished Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages. It purports to be a history of the “gifts” of medieval Christendom, but it really is a pastiche of selected icons from that era, icons chosen for their accordance with modern sensibilities.
(It is easiest to claim that elements from the medieval period were “gifts” to the modern West if one selects out from that period those elements which most resemble one’s values, irrespective of whether there was an actual causal or genealogical link between the medieval and the modern iterations thereof.)
I suspect that Cahill found this the hardest book to pull off, because for the first time in this series, he doesn’t pull it off well. Admirably, he tries to put to pasture the old saw about the medieval period being “the Dark Ages,” where learning and freedom went on a very long holiday under the oppressive luddism of the evil Catholic Church.
Yet the best he can mount in its place is a patchwork (his own image, actually) of vignettes of people whose ideas or behavior look most like something we moderns would like to hitch our carts to. And these tend to be (are not exclusively, but tend to be) personages who found themselves at odds with the political or religious elite, or manage to be stunning exceptions to the rules of their times. Prophets against papal excesses, men and women of wild sexual freedom, writers uncomfortable with the dogma of the time are his saints, the givers of the gifts he’s willing to receive. The oppressive, luddite, hyper-bureaucratic Catholic Church still lurks in the background, and Cahill isn’t theologian or political theorist enough to explain why, for example, that same church canonized Catherine of Siena precisely for that prophetic witness he loves in her.
On the other hand, these vignettes are delightfully written. Cahill has a knack for drawing one in to the world he describes–one can almost smell the chateau as Queen Eleanor and her retinue are leaving it, almost feel what Dante must have felt about the political maneuvering that cost him his home, almost see the paintbrush in Giotto’s hand.
It’s a great book to get one excited about the prospect of understanding the Middle Ages; it is not, however, the book to give one a good overview of medieval history. But I’ve got nine other books on the list, so somewhere in there I should get a decent sense of what was going on.
Comments (3)
Yummy! I love book reviews…Lisa
I have been following Cahill’s work since he write about the Irish. I tend to think of him as a popularizer who lets those of us who are not historians into his world a little bit.
I was not impressed as much with the “Gifts of the Jews” but that is probably because I know quite a lot about Judaism and its development, and he did not adequately cover the way the tradition remains living through Talmud and Midrash. He managed to make it appear more linear and monolithic–even with respect to our views of time and history–than it actually is. Also, not being a Hebrew scholar, he does not really understand how the language–with no real tenses–captures the prophetic voice very differently than does the English. Nevertheless, I think he did tell his stories quite well, and I enjoyed reading the other books, especially the one on Christianity–The Desire of the Everlasting Hills–because I came away with a more sympathetic view than I had before.
It sounds like I would like to read this book. I will keep in mind the caveats that you discussed, as well as my experience of reading a book in which he delved into stuff that I actually know something about!
Excellent review. I read this last July and appreciated bits and parts. I don’t think Cahill has ever matched the work he did in How the Irish Saved Civilization.
I’d love to know what other books you are reading in this area.