A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Middle Ages

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This volume explores a world that thought deeply about imperial power and emperors but one that perhaps never had an empire of its own. These synthetic essays from experts across a wide variety of disciplines mine the intellectual world of this period and begin to demolish the myth of the so-called Dark Ages, showing how the European Middle Ages were illuminated by vigorous debates that echo today. The story of medieval Western empires is both familiar and foreign. It is a story about politics, culture, religion, society, gender, sex, and economics, and how porous the boundaries between those categories can often be. A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Middle Ages offers a detailed and highly-illustrated account of how we got to where we are, as well as the dangers of not fully understanding why those origins matter.

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Each volume could successfully stand alone as a reference work on an era: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, and the Modern Age ... The introductory essay to each is a valuable resource for comparing traditional political and economic histories with the more critical and cultural works presented in subsequent chapters. Accompanying each volume is a list of illustrations, notes, further reading, and an index ... Overall, students seeking a comparative, interdisciplinary, and compelling account of the spread of Western empires will find much of interest here. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Matthew Gabriele is Professor of medieval studies and chair of the Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech, USA. He is the author of An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (2011), many articles on medieval Europe and the memory of the Middle Ages, and most recently with David M. Perry The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (2021).