Brightening the Dark Ages

In clearing up my files, I discovered that I failed to report out on some of my reading some years ago. Back in 2022, I enjoyed the 2021 book by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry entitled The Bright Ages. You can find an ebook copy at my favourite vendor.

Gabriele and Perry offered me a view of Roman and European history that I found fascinating. They focus on the early medieval period, which is sometimes called the Dark Ages, although there is some discussion on this word choice. It is a particularly northwestern European perspective as the period was hardly dark in Al Andaluz or the Bagdad Caliphate.

Our authors point out that much of our perspective on Rome is set by the work of Gibbon¹ and other Victorian scholars whose perspective was framed by the rising British Empire. This English project found much comfort in attaching their history to the history of the Roman Empire. The result is to set Rome in a fixed position with a sudden fall, rather than understanding and exploring the gradual change that occurred.² This perspective sees Rome stopping for several hundred years and then civilisation is recovered almost entirely by the miraculous work of Florentine intellectuals. The thousand years between are forgotten and we rarely even mention the work of Isidore of Seville,³ Galla Placidia,⁴ or the remarkable scholars of Córdoba and Toledo.⁵

Much like the remarkable work of Maria Rosa Menocal, The Bright Ages offers a new way to looking at the historical facts. This question of framing what we know, however limited, is part of our ability as sapiens to build intellectual constructs that bind us together in groups larger than our tribal limits.⁶ That means that any particular telling of history is a tool of its time. Gabriele and Perry are speaking to our time, but I suspect only subsequent generations will be able to see what that framing really is. At present, we can only note that all history is a framed story based, as much as possible, on verifiable facts. In keeping that in mind, we can more thoughtfully read histories old and new.

Footnotes

1. Gibbon, Edward. 1776. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire. ↩︎
2. Gabriele, Matthew, and David M. Perry. 2021. The Bright Ages: A new history of medieval Europe. HarperCollins. Chapter 1 page 2/9. Ebook edition: https://www.ebooks.com/en-es/book/210128823/the-bright-ages/matthew-gabriele/.
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3. Wikipedia contributors. 2025-08-24. Isidore of Seville. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed 2025-08-28 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isidore_of_Seville. ↩︎
4. Wikipedia contributors. 2025-08-17. “Galla Placidia.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galla_Placidia. ↩︎
5. Menocal, Maria Rosa. 2009. The Ornament of the World. Little, Brown and Company. Ebook edition: https://www.ebooks.com/en-es/book/1452904/the-ornament-of-the-world/maria-rosa-menocal/. ↩︎
6. Harari, Noah Yuval. 2015. Sapiens. HarperCollins. Chapter 2 6/15. https://www.ebooks.com/en-es/book/1631238/sapiens/yuval-noah-harari/. ↩︎