The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham

The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham

The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense `dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand ourselves? The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and ambition. Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will transform its many readers’ ideas about the crucible in which Europe would in the end be created. From the collapse of the Roman imperial system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps this book’s most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement. From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something surprising or arresting on every page.

'Chris Wickham is the leading expert on early medieval Europe, and [The Inheritance of Rome] is.. refreshingly different from all the traditional accounts ... a work of tremendous authority and breadth. With this book, as with Charlemagne's empire, one feels that an extraordinary range of things have been brought together, and that it may be a long time before they are united so successfully again' - Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. His book Framing the Middle Ages, which was published in 2005, won the Wolfson Prize, the Deutscher Memorial Prize and the James Henry Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association. He taught for many years at the University of Birmingham and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780713994292
ISBN 10	0713994290
Title	The Inheritance of Rome
Author	Chris Wickham
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	2009-01-29
Number of pages	720
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable