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 because they see in them the seeds of modernity are thus guilty of viewing the past through the lens of the present rather than accepting it on its own terms.  

Wickham states it plainly on page one: “historical development does not go to; it goes from.” Medieval Europe, he writes, “is interesting in and for itself; it does not need to be validated by any subsequent developments.”  But why study medieval Europe if other places and times are also interesting?  The best Wickham can come up with is: “The attraction of sticking to what we have is precisely that 500-1500 is an artificial span of time, in which changes can be tracked in different ways in different places, without them having to lead teleologically to some major event at the end, whether Reformation, revolution, industrialization, or any other sign of ‘modernity.’ … if its artificiality is recognized, the medieval European experience can be used comparatively, to be set against other experiences in a more neutral and thus useful way.”  

And if that isn’t confusing enough, there’s this: “…medieval Europe is simply a large differentiated space, seen across a long time period. It is also well enough documented to allow some quite nuanced study. This is not a romantic image at all, and is intended not to be. But this space and time holds some enthralling material all the same.” Which calls to mind the old joke about a person down on all fours.  

“What are you doing?” a passer-by asks. 

“I’m looking for my contact lens.” 

“Where did you lose it?” 

“Over there.”  

“Then why are you looking over here?” 

“Because the light is better.”

The only reason Wickham can think of to study medieval Europe, evidently, is that it’s documentarily richer in terms of archives, church registries, theological treatises, and the like and hence well suited to “nuanced study.”  But where the person in the joke is at least looking for something, Wickham seems to believe it’s wrong to look for anything at all. 

Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Wickham’s survey is not without its rewards.  He is good on the barebones society that emerged after the barbarian conquests of the fifth century in which kings were less rich, peasants were less poor, and economics in general were greatly simplified.  He is quite good on the subject of taxes, which had all but disappeared from the disorganized west by the year 700.  “Kings began to rely on the revenues from their own lands … rather than fiscal receipts, except for tolls on commerce,” he writes.  “The whole economic basis for political action shifted, from taxation to landowning.”

The effect was to stimulate agricultural production since peasants were no longer subject to confiscatory taxation by the state while at the same time holding down trade other than in humble local products.  Wickham points out that the European peasantry during the so-called Dark Ages was not only unusually free by the standards of the day, but even dominant.  As he puts it: “in general the economy of most of the north is likely to have followed the logic of peasant, not aristocratic choices and needs for a long time. This is supported by the rarity of large concentrations of wealth in the early medieval archaeology of the north, with the significant exception of Denmark, until the Viking period.”  Monarchs lived more like peasants while, by the eleventh century, an increasingly well-off countryside was sprouting its own nouveaux riches.

Still, Wickham's horror of formal methodology leads to gaps and inconsistencies.  While he has much to say about the peasantry’s political status, he is relatively silent about rural technology even though advances in agricultural productivity were what gave the medieval economy its initial lift.  He is silent on water mills and windmills, which were hardly less transformative than coal centuries later.  He discusses Christianity in broad-brush terms but says nothing about how western doctrine differed from that of Byzantium or how clerical organization differed as well.  (Where emperors controlled the church in the east, Gregory of Tours fairly bullied Merovingian kings like Chilperic I in the west.)  He also doesn’t mention the west’s unique legal structure, especially the rediscovery of Roman corporate law, which enabled Europeans to form themselves into guilds, religious fraternities, scuole, and companies.  Organizational density of this sort was also one of the distinguishing characteristics of the west.  Finally, he is silent on the eradication of slavery, which, by the eighth and ninth century, is what differentiated western Christendom most sharply from the Muslim caliphate.

Wickham’s grasp of Muslim history is surprisingly unsure.  He writes apropos of the caliphate that “khalifa means ‘deputy’ – that is to say, of God.”  But it originally meant merely a deputy of the prophet.  He says that “it is becoming increasingly likely … that the Qur’an had reached something close to its final form already by around 650, as Muslim traditions have indeed always held.”  Notwithstanding Wikipedia, which Wickham actually cites as his source, the debate continues to rage.  He says that westerners have viewed Muslim political development “through the lens of Orientalism … full of incomprehensible intrigue and harsh and repetitive – indeed, essentially meaningless – changes of regime.”  But since both Ibn Khaldun and Engels commented on the repetitive nature of Muslim regime change even though they lived five centuries apart, that tired old term “Orientalism” seems particularly inapt.

Contrary to Wickham, history is not just one damned thing after another, but a science packed with meaning no less than events.