Fried does a solid job arguing that the middle ages were not the irrational, cloistered, dark times that some vanishingly small number of early modern historians tell us they were; he preaches, I am the choir. That aspect of the book is salutary, but not particularly novel. It's also ironic that Fried, so zealous to protect the middle ages, does to late antiquity exactly what modern historians did to the middle ages: for him, the tribes of Europe really are just barbarians, wandering around with clubs, looking for some enlightened Roman to bludgeon.

To say I was disappointed by the chapters on the early middle ages would, then, be a bit of an understatement. But once we get to Charlemagne, things pick up, and thereafter this is a very good, broad history. Anglophone readers, like me, probably know more about the English (or perhaps French) middle ages than we need to, and a good deal less about the Germanic than we should; the fact that Fried is, well, German, means that his focus is a little further East than that of most historians I've read, and I found that very pleasant. A more interesting polemic than the "they just weren't the dark ages" argument is his revision of the HRE's most famous men: Frederick Barbarossa gets cut down to size, as does Frederick the Great. That's interesting stuff. But the hit-job on Kant, who gets almost all the blame for the Dark Ages fallacy, is incredibly silly, and shows that German historians are no less provincial than the English (who are more likely to blame Gibbon for this kind of thing).

The book has gone through a number of editions in German, and that shows--there's a touch too much repetition, and some clunky structures. The translation is readable, but nobody would mistake it for a book written in English; this is an Englished German book, with lots of strange constructions and inversions. But overall, this is a good history, that I could recommend.

I could, except that some combination of the translator, the editor, and the editorial board at Harvard have turned a good piece of scholarship into a remarkable shit-show of incompetence. This book was published under the mysteriously prestigious 'Harvard Belknap' imprint, which means high-quality paper, high-quality images, and a wonderful physical object (none of that two pieces of cardboard pasted together by a slim piece of fabric nonsense here; this is an honest-to-god hardcover book). Despite this, they apparently couldn't find the money they needed for a proof-reader of any ability whatsoever. I'd suspect, if the thought wasn't so impossible, that someone accidentally uploaded an early draft and then printed it, instead of a finished product.

My first inkling of this came when Gregory the Great's Dialogues are said to be a biography of St. Benedict. You might think that "dialogues" is an odd title for such a work, and of course you'd be right; a life of St. Benedict is included in Gregory's work. I complained about this to my wife, who suggested I was turning into/already was the worst, silliest kind of disconnected intellectual. Fair enough.

But there are other things that you don't have to be an ivory tower flower to abhor. Here is the entirety of note 32 from chapter 10:

32. "Letter to Posterity," see note 32 in this chapter.

David Foster Wallace couldn't have done a better endnote than that!

Ptolemy, who possibly co-authored a political tractate with Aquinas, has his name spelled differently in different chapters. Not a huge problem, but consistency isn't that hard, really.

And nor is, or nor should be, spotting typos. By chapter 11 I was so infuriated that I decided to record them. Here is my list:

"Several factors may have some into play here" [some for come]
"So it was that in Paris, the old emperor, accompanied by his son Wencelas (who had already been crowned 'kind of the Romans,' and his nephew" [the parenthesis is never closed]
"Finally, the territories of the House of Luxembourg were split: in Bohemia and the empire" [ambiguous--they were split in both Bohemia and the empire, but this sentence makes it sound like they were split between them]
"Only Aragon put off deciding in favor of one or other of the popes; the reasons for this lay in the special problems facing its king, Peter IV, 'El Ceremonios' as he would later be called, was seeking to impose a stricter order upon his realm" [the comma before Peter should be a period]
"theoretical deliberations, formulated by one of hte most important political writers of the Middle Ages Francesc Eiximenis" [missing comma before Francesc]
"Eiximenis placed the cosa publica, and the communitat of the realm above the king" [unnecessary comma after publica]
"He declared the Corts to be the appropriate court of law... and that it even had the power, should the monarch transgress against the country's laws--to dismiss the king from his post." [unnecessary m dash, although it does add an odd, Nietzschean vibe to the sentence]
"The crown of Aragon had this passed the zenith of its power" [this for thus]
"The social consequences of such a doctrine were only a matter of time." [I'm glad they weren't a matter of economics or culture, anyway]
"Things were going badly in England was Ball's message, spread by Froissart, and would continue to do so" [Confusing inversion of 'Things...' and 'Ball's message, spread by Froissart']
"they were declared heretics and threatened with being burned at the stake, This did little to deter them" [comma before 'This' instead of a period]
"The terrifying first-hand experience of death also held sway elsewhere" [pretty sure he means 'second-hand' experience, given that he goes on to quote someone]
The Decameron unfolds "against this dismal backcloth" [in English, we say backdrop]
"there is no longer any sense of Death being a force that liberates man from the Vale of Tears that every soul once believed that it was condemned to suffer here below" [at this point I started noting impossibly awkward sentences, too]
"the first great break with normality that changed everything was the Black Death" [huh?]
"Charles V of France not only had the Louvre extended but also fortified, and also built the Bastille, which would later become the symbol par excellence of the oppression of the French people." [Awkward]

You think I'm being too hard? That I'm deliberately trying to find proof-reading errors, which don't really affect anyone's reading of a book? I harvested this crop between page 427 and 447. These pages are entirely representative of the book as a whole.

Harvard UP: hire me. I'm looking for work, and I can pretty obviously do this better than whoever's doing it now. ( )