I promised /u/SilverLevander a couple weeks ago that I would look over Mark Greengrass' recent Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648. For those of you joining us from a typical American high school history education :P, 1517 was when Martin Luther sent his 95 theses to the archbishop of Mainz, as good a date as any to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation. 1648 is the Peace of Westphalia: the end of the Thirty Years' War, which witnessed the realignment of western Europe along political rather than inter-Christian lines and is thus taught as the "birth of the nation-state system."

These are utterly traditional boundary markers, which is what you would expect--perhaps hope for--in a volume of the Penguin History of Europe series. The point is not to offer a new narrative, like you get from Peter Wallace's The Long European Reformation, which sees the entire sweep from 1350 to 1750 as a cohesive era. As Greengrass' title indicates, he's telling the standard story of how medieval Europe united under The Church as temporal and spiritual power (Christendom) became a Europe of Christians with multiple state churches whose temporal power was neutered almost beyond recognition. SilverLevander was right in their earlier remarks: in terms of understanding, there's not much new here. But there doesn't have to be. The PHE series, like the Oxford equivalent, is pretty much intended to be a readable textbook.

Greengrass is a fine scholar and a decent enough writer. Any author wrangling with telling this much history in a slim volume has to make an infinite number of choices of what to cut and what to include. His methodology here is also pretty standard for this time of "narrative textbook." Some sections are sweepingly idea- and vocabulary-word based; others proceed by telling a snippet about a person or group. The chapters are divided primarily by topic rather than chronology, which is one of the two standard ways to tell this type of history. (The other is to divide by nationality, or at least, religious confession).

So if Christendom Destroyed is a tidy overview of the standard historiography, not groundbreaking but by no means stuck in 19th century confessional and nationalist history, why should you not read it?

This is one of the most accidentally and pointlessly sexist history books I've read in a long time.

I stress "accidentally" and "pointlessly" here because I do think Greengrass (and his peer reviewers) thought he did a fine job at "inclusion." Individual women get mentioned! Women as a group get mentioned!

I want to highlight here some of the ways that Greengrass talks about women versus men.

Under the rubric of what Greengrass calls "Catholic Reinvigoration", he discusses the 16C foundation of new religious orders. The Jesuits <3 get an incredibly meaty section--probably one of the micro-focus bits in the book; I'm not complaining. Greengrass devotes A LOT of space to establishing the particulars of Iggy Lo's life, spirituality, the foundation of the order, subsequent generations of Jesuits, their evangelization, catechization, and education efforts across Europe and the world.

Then: "The impact of Catholic reinvigoration owed a great deal to women...But how was active ministry by women to work in practice [when they were supposed to be cloistered behind walls]?"

Yes! Awesome! What could the answer be?

The Ursulines exploited their connections with Archbishop Borromeo, gradually accepting enclosure but maintaining devout activity.

Uh...

Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales’s Order of the Visitation (‘Visitandines’) briefly flourished in Savoy and France in the early seventeenth century as a community of female widows, whose family commitments or fragile health prevented them from entering religious orders but who wanted their dedication to God to be reflected in social mission.

Okay, but what social mission?

Mary Ward emigrated to the Catholic Low Countries in 1606 and was inspired by the Jesuits to establish her own order (the Institute of Mary) in 1609. The growing presence of Mary Ward’s sisters, coupled with their association with the Jesuits and their refusal to accept enclosure and use a regular habit, earned Sister Mary many enemies. Her ladies were dismissed as ‘noxious weeds’ and ‘galloping girls’ and she was condemned as a heretic in 1631, her order being suppressed the following year.

Mary Ward was an utter badass and the IBVM endures today, but, what did these "noxious weeds" do?

Early in the book, Greengrass explore this era from a social history perspective: class, family, gender, etc. He includes an entire paragraph on the status of women in early modern Europe. There are no particulars here. "Many strident voices of patriarchy." "Widows were not generally forced to remarry." "The Church tried to protect [women's] freedom of conscience." (Reviewer's note: not always; Martin Luther himself recommended that evangelical women who found themselves married to Catholics should submit to their husbands including in matters of faith.)

"But," Greengrass writes,

What stands out most is the variety in Europe’s marriage patterns.

Yes! Let's get back to talking about men, please.

Even worse, the so-called European Marriage Pattern of relatively equal, late marriage age for women and men that predominates in late medieval/early modern northwestern Europe has been seen as a major factor in shaping the different socio-economic fortunes of northern and southern Europe, down to the modern day. The difference isn't men's life-cycle; it's women working as adolescents. You wouldn't know that from reading Greengrass. Instead, we learn:

So the great change in this period was the triumph of male primogeniture among Europe’s élites.

One final example. Greengrass rightly includes a substantial if shallow discussion of the very complicated subject of literacy and education <3 in early modern Europe. He covers the rural/urban divide, vernacular and Latin, the changes in education patterns, hints at the debate over the "modernizing" role of Protestantism, and even mentions how even vernacular literacy privileged men. I'd love to have seen a discussion of how this situation was different than the late Middle Ages, but I'm biased here. The topical division of the book also hurts Greengrass here. Religious orders played a very important role in education in this era--especially for women; if you're a western girl who can read, thank a 16th century nun--but religious orders aren't the topic of conversation.

But then Greengrass includes this anecdote:

In Hungary, even aristocratic women struggled with the pen. The second wife of Count György Thurzó was illiterate when they married in 1592. Two years later, she had learned enough to write a few words in her letter to him, when he was besieging a Turkish castle in the Turkish-Hungarian wars, and he was delighted.

Excuse me? The "second wife of Count György Thurzó"? The topic of the section is women's literacy. You can get the accents right for him, and you frame the incident through his eyes...but you can't even say her name?

Wikipedia told me. Wikipedia.

Her name was Erzsébet Czobor.

I cannot recommend this book.

Had a productive week. Polished off Kaminski's A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution, which remained pretty tedious but at least went fast. He actually got me to feel sympathetic to some anti-federalists, which is a first. Sean Wilentz tried a similar thing, but he was entirely handicapped by his conviction that slavery can't ever matter to anybody unless it's rhetorically convenient for him. Kaminski has no such desperate need to whitewash a political movement.

From there I picked up Finkelman's Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, which I really enjoyed. He changed my mind about the 3/5 Compromise, clarified things I'd previously thought about the Northwest Ordinance, and left Thomas Jefferson and his hagiographers endowed with additional orifices. I expected the two Jefferson chapters to be hard going, but they turned out just the opposite. I've got the second edition, which corrects a few errors and adds a great essay about Federalist antislavery. That brings me back to Wilentz again, who dismissed it as mere partisanship and consequently insincere and irrelevant. The black voters didn't think so, but Wilentz rarely cares about them. Finkelman misses a few opportunities, though. He dings Jefferson for his embargo against Haiti. That's fine, but the embargo didn't start until 1806, more than halfway through Jefferson's presidency. I'd have liked to see more development behind that change of policy. Did he try before then and face opposition? Or did something change elsewhere? Finkelman also rightly notes that the Missouri Controversy involved a lot of Federalists and former Federalists for slavery restriction, but he doesn't even acknowledge that James Tallmadge, Jr. was a Republican. The omission is conspicuous and smells of trying a bit too hard.

All in all, it's still a solid book. Unfortunately reading it dampened my interest in reading The Age of Federalism because Finkelman tells me that there's basically zero slavery content. That's all very traditional, but still disappointing. Particularly considering I hoped to read it as a companion to Empire of Liberty, which I know has similar issues.

Since I finished Finkelman, I've started in on Cooper's Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860.

L. Sprague de Camp's Lost continents; the Atlantis theme in history, science, and literature. What it says on the tin, really - a survey of the evolution of the idea of Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria from 1970. De Camp is better known for his work as an anthologist and his critical works on H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard - and with plenty of criticism for his work as a biographer, literary critic, pasticheur, etc. - but he was also a trained archaeologist and published a couple works aimed at "debunking" things and educating the public on the history of technology. It can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff on this kind of thing, and it's still better to look at the original sources (many of which are, thankfully, in the public domain at this point), so de Camp is more of a roadmap than an endpoint, but it's a fairly useful roadmap...even if it does remind me how 1970 was oh so long ago.

I have been reading 'With the Old Breed' by Eugene Sledge. I really want to read the other books by Marines who were there. Any reading on the Battle of Pelelui is fascinating to me. It was such a horrific battle. It perplexes me to think about what those men had to do on that little island. I would like to travel there someday and see the battlefield for myself. I'm not sure what about this battle fascinates me the most, but it really demonstrates the savagery of the Pacific Theatre.

If you have anymore books about the 1st Marine Division during World War II I'm open to suggest.