Review of Chris Wickham’s “Medieval Europe”
How times change. Thirty years ago, Chris Wickham was a rising young medieval historian calling for “a new Marxist theory of the complexities of socio-economic change” in the pages of the New Left Review. Now, judging from his latest work, Medieval Europe, he has given up not only on Marxism, but on any theory or mode of analysis whatsoever. All suffer, he believes, from the sin of teleology, the notion that history is imbued with a logic, goal, or purpose. Historians who study the Middle Ages... Читать дальше...