Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edit: I never completed the book and returned it. I feel the authors are not sincerely interested in a true evaluation of the medieval era but are rather using it as a platform to bring up their politics related to the current era. While it's true every text has a slant, at least some attempt at sincere historiography should be made. Original review: I'm a big fan of enthusiastic medieval histories - books like Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine or C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image. Books like this avoid looking down their nose at the so-called Middle Ages and illustrate how there's really no dividing lines in Western European history - the Roman era never really ended, it segued into the medieval era - which segued into our era. This book appears to be a happy addition to books which accurately reframe the Middle Ages. However, one caveat is apparent right from the introduction. This book will be readily understood by a general audience, which is a good thing. But it's not written for one. Already in the introduction, you'll find scattered postmodern and critical theorist buzzwords being dropped every few paragraphs. If you are familiar with postmodern studies, you'll be pleased; if you're anyone else, you'll be a little bewildered. An early, startling paragraph ridicules "modern thinkers" who "look to the European past" and "imagine they find white faces" and "the fiction of Europe." This is followed by a reference to Covid-19 (which I feel will date the text unnecessarily, but who knows). Europeans are a thoroughly modern invention and myth, they explain - along with whiteness and Western civilization. Re-reading the paragraph, I realize they launched this by talking about 18th and 19th century imperialist philosophers. Did I purchase a delightful-looking book about the medieval era so I could be sternly reminded that anthropologists and sociologists in the 1800s were racist? Not really. But those guys are a preoccupation of modern academics - 18th and 19th century academia and its racism consumes their thoughts. They are constantly trying to escape the history of their chosen fields. But as a regular lay reader, dead white anthropologists are not my obsession nor my interest. I entered this book being interested in the medieval era. The introduction is disappointing. I hope the rest of the book will not be so, and will update this review when I have completed it.