/u/reddit-folklore asked why I think the Middle Ages ended in 1523. I've never fully written this out, so let's do a thing.

Periodization is of course always nebulous, because causes, effects, changes, and continuities never align neatly and never all fall into place at once. Take the printing press. What is the "really important" moment: the changes that led up to movable type being profitable to adopt widely? The actual invention of injectable letter-molds? Or the societal effects of mass production of texts? The answer is "all three." Unfortunately, we like neat dates, so 1450s it tends to be. But if you knit the two eras together, and are willing to transcend the need for neatness, you can tell a continuous story from the twelfth-ish century onward of the increasing literate orientation of society, broadening need for and access to texts.

And yet, there's no question that the literacy scene looks substantially different in 1560 than 1360. "Medieval" and "early modern" feel different. But then arises the problem. What do we mean by medieval? See, the idea of a "middle age," which itself is a late medieval/Renaissance invention, is originally a null set. It was those dark centuries between the decline of classical society and learning, and its attempted revival in European cities.

So then it falls to the medievalist to say, "Wait a minute, I don't study nothing. What do we mean by Middle Ages?" For various reasons, scholars have approached this question first of all Eurocentrically, but also through two different (of course related) primary paradigms: political and religious, which is to say Christian. Right now, we lack good debate on the "narrative" or meaning of the later Middle Ages, that is, ~1000-1500; on the other hand, there are a series of sweeping narratives on the early Middle Ages (~500-1000) had have approached our overarching question for just that half millennium: what is the identity of "early Middle Ages?"

And sure enough, we have the political view--let's call it "The Inheritance of Rome," because if it's good enough for Chris Wickham it's good enough for us. In this view, the early Middle Ages is defined by the reverberations of Romanitas and their evolution through decentralization and interaction with non-Roman civilizations. This is attractive, among other reasons, because it casts a wider net than Western Europe--Eastern Europe, Byzantium, MENA, and their frontier interactions can be included.

This option we'll call "The Rise of Western Christendom," because, well, if it is good enough for Peter Brown it is good enough for us. The underlying narrative here is Christendom: not necessarily the actual beliefs and their spread, althouh that's part of it, but the construction of an ecclesiastical network uniting the morphous polities of western Europe and inventing the power to motivate those polities' rulers in various actions, from individual pilgrimage to collective pilgrimage (i.e. the Crusades).

To me, the second narrative has a lot more power and flexibility to define the Middle Ages as a whole. Yes, including its greater apparent Eurocentricity, when we consider the positioning of Europe within the world system in 325, in 1096, and in 1491. Scholars are fairly united in seeing major societal changes in the west in the long twelfth century--including, by the way, the rise of bureaucracy as reflecting and catalyzing political consolidation and very slowly changing systems of exercising power. There are major, MAJOR changes in the Church over this time period, but in my opinion they are sort of the capstone and uniting factor of all the other changes (urbanization, population growth, the rise of vernaculars in writing, etc). I would tell the Middle Ages as the story of "Western Christendom"--its invention, struggles, and triumph as a spiritual and secular authority uniting western Europe and reflecting/pushing its outward ambitions.

You know where this is going with the end of the Middle Ages, then: the German Reformation. The sudden chasm where Western Christendom becomes western churchdoms, plural. Church and polity are still inseparable in many ways, especially on the level of individual people's lives, but there is no uniting Church in the part of the world that is about to make "global history" mean the whole globe.

So the German Reformation, but people like tidy numbers. Why 1523, not 1517 or 1521 or 1525 or 1528 or...?

In 1523, the "Luther movement" had quite a bit of steam in Germna lands and across borders. When we look at the snowstorm of pamphlet publications in support of evangelical ideas--especially by lay people--it becomes a blizzard in 1523. But we're talking big structual ideas to define an era. And thus we enter the Reichstag of mid 1523.

German parliament was a secular institution, of course. But in 1523, they ruled that the Luther movement represented a schism in the Church, not a heresy.

Of course the medieval Church is kind of famous for its schisms, several of which in fact affected only Germany. But those were different in that they were schisms wihin the Church, spurred by the Church, claiming to be the Church in Rome (even if in exile). They drew rulers into their conflicts/secular politics affected them, but they were schisms in the Church. In 1523, a secular authority took it upon itself to declare a Church Council-level theological position.

Don't take this too far. The decision had no immediate impact; Protestants and Catholics are going to be burning and drowning each other as heretics for a long, long time (and everybody's burning the Anabaptists). But if we're looking for a tidy, symbolic marker, 1523 is a pivotla point in the religious and political history of Europe, both, It's the moment when the lords believed they had the authority (had spent centuries building) to ruler over the Church, not through it. And it's the moment where Western Christendom was bifurcated by the power of outside observers.

It's symbolic and incomplete--as any marker of periodization will necessarily be.

I had a lot of thoughts on this, so I may have sacrificed some flow in the name of getting this to a manageable length. Anyway.

Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment was a book that I was pretty excited to read, being one of those big, publically facing "global history" books, but focused on central Asia. “Global history” is a very in vogue concept--To limit myself to a somewhat cliched overview, the ever increasing globalization of current affairs has driven both an interest in historical perspectives that privileges the general over the specific and the connectedness over the autochthonous, and also has opened up new possibilities of research, both in terms of the great strides in archaeological work as well as the increasing availability of archives in non European languages. And not to delve too deep into the psychology of the age, but over the last decades “global history” has taken on a certain social urgency. Writing about how The East was not just a barbarous wasteland is not just worthwhile scholarly task, but also has a real political relevance.

Lost Enlightenment is kind of in that global history tradition, although in a rather theoretically naive way. Despite the promises of its early chapters, this is much less about history being produced via the interaction of cultures and regions and more about how one particular region added a bunch of tick marks to the world historic check list. Its perspective on cultural and intellectual history is very much one of a great chain of ideas, and the case this book makes is that central Asia represents several of the links of the chain. Thus, I emerge from the book with a pretty good sense of where Avicenna/Ibn Sina fits regarding “world culture”, but a pretty weak one regarding where he fit in eleventh century Persia.

Which, I think is as good a time as ever to mention scientism. Scientism is the elevation of the sciences to an ideological position, usually referring to attempts to ground science purely within itself or to apply scientific method to things like morality, but I think it also has a place in historical inquiry. A national history, for example, sees the history of a particular group or place as centered around an ethnic group, generally passing from an ethnogenesis through periods of degeneracy until the emergence of ethnic consciousness and the culmination of the creation of a political nation state. It sorts its figures into the good, who carry on the historical mission of the nationality, and the bad, who betray it. A religious history is similar, beginning at revelation, passing through decay and degeneracy, but culminating at the “correct interpretation” (ie, the contemporary one). It might also sort its characters into prophets, doctors, heretics and apostates. A scientism history does something similar: generally beginning with the Greeks, then passing through periods of degeneracy (here superstition or religion) before Enlightenment and, finally, the modern world. And here to you have your characters who are good, like Aristotle or Galileo, and the bad, like the generic Pope. A figure who move things forward, even if they were popular in their day, is relegated to irrelevancy or branded a heretic. Thus a Wong Chong is held up as a brilliant thinker for his acerbic skepticism (usually a materialist skepticism is treated as the end of the line) despite not being very widely read, but you will search through overviews of Chinese philosophy in vain trying to find writings from the dominant Han Dynasty Daoist-Confucian synthesis. The Atomists are swooned over, Theurgy is forgotten. Overviews of European history will have extensive passages from Machiavelli and not a single mention of the Mirrors for Princes.

This book is one that is thoroughly embedded within the tradition and the practices of scientism. It functionally acts as an extended episode of Cosmos, and its core is a long series of biographies that act less as biographies than as long enumerations of achievements, the achievements being pushing the cause of science forward. Or, in the case of the villains such as Mahmoud of Ghazni (branded, somewhat dubiously, as a philistine) or al-Ghazali (characterized relentlessly as a hypocrite), castigations for the crime of attempting to stop the glorious progression of science and reason (in the grand tradition of scientism, neither term is defined).

Despite this, I enjoyed it. Some of the biographical sketches, such as that of al-Khwarazmi, Mahmud Kashgari, and particularly Ferdowsi, were well done, blending interesting anecdotal tidbits with broader social contexts. But the book really shines when it steps away from the individual life stories or achievements of one man (and it is men) and looks more at the grand sweep of events. The early chapters, dealing with the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period are perhaps the best in the whole book at presenting a fascinating portrait of a “crossroads civilization” (as opposed to a “crossroads of civilization”--it is a neat formulation in the introduction, the implications of which go largely unexplored) perhaps in no small part because there simply are not the sort of biographical details the book gets so bogged down in. The Abbasid period gets a nuanced and depiction, the Samanids a somewhat fawning but still enjoyable one, and if the section on the Kara-Kitans spends a bit too much time arguing against the near century dead Vasily Bartold, given the popular facing nature of the book that may not be a bad thing.

Structurally, there are two books here: the first is a very well written history of the great cultural centers of central Asia, focusing on the first five or so century of Muslim rule, and ending with the demise of the Timurid kingdoms. The second is a rather tedious collection of extended biographies. Thematically, two, there are took books: one is a well drawn portrait of an often overlooked period and region of the world and the momentous changes it underwent from about 500-1500. The second is an entirely uncritical depiction of whig history, distinguished mainly because certain parts of the story take place a bit more east than we are used to seeing them. One of these books is very good, another is not. It is hard for me to uncritically endorse Lost Enlightenment, but a book that makes such a strong case for Merv and Bukhara being entered into the list of the great cities of the world can’t just be tossed aside.

Addendum: there is also the question of fact, so to speak. Academic reviews absolutely savaged the depiction of al Ghazali and the Timurid and post-Timurid intellectual character of the Muslim world. Not familiar with either, I won’t comment, but I found the statement of Uzbekistan produced the earliest known wheat grain striking, as it has not, as well as descriptions of the Safavid dynasty as being “Turkic” and an extremely maximalist interpretation of the death count from the Mongol expansions, to say nothing of more squishy claims, such as that Babur was a religious hardliner, that Aurangzeb contributed nothing to administration, and really just the whole biography of Mahmoud of Ghazni. Caveat lector.

Finished up This Vast Southern Empire. It was...ok? Not bad? It's not a bad book, but I ended not entirely sure what the innovation was. If it's Karp's early stuff with the Southern navalists, that's the weakest part. Later on he seems to basically just shift emphasis and repeat standard antebellum narratives, with most of the domestic policy stripped out.

Moved on from there to Stemped from the Beginning, which falsely bills itself as the definitive history of racist ideas in America. It may be a history of antiblack racist ideas, which is what the author admits to inside the covers, but like /u/anthropology_nerd said last week that's about it. I'm just up into William Lloyd Garrison and Native Americans haven't come up once that I recall.

It's also been disappointingly poppy. I've started marking points where Kendi oversimplifies. When I check his citations they're generally in order, but he elides things that ought to be relevant to his point. The big one that stands out so far is how he clearly read enough to know better about the 3/5 Compromise, but he defaults back to the pop culture version anyway. Why? There's a whole interesting, complicated story there which vanishes under the blunt force of "the framers thought black people were 3/5 people".

I don't hate it, but I expected something more like A History of White People or White Over Black and so far it feels more like a popularization of the latter.

Decided to dive into Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by McDonnell again, because, why not.

Like Richter before him, McDonnell forces readers to shift their focus, to look east (and west, for that matter) from the heartland of the Anishinaabeg/Odawa in the Great Lakes, instead of only reading Native American history from a perspective facing west (from Albany or Plymouth or Montreal) in those brief, fleeting exchanges of European foreigners interacting with vibrant cultures and a complex web of alliances they minimally understood. The Odawa are in the driver's seat in this book, positioning themselves between colonial rivals, brokering peace with other nations for their own gain, and using extended kin networks reaching from the Mississippi to the Saint Lawrence to shape the history of North America. Allow me to quote one of my favorite passages in the introduction...

While Europeans for a long time took a subordinate role in the pays d'en haut, the Odawa at the straits and other Anishinaabe and Algonquin people's across the region together played a critical part in the making of early America. Not one canoe would have survived the trip up to the pays d'en haut without the help of Indian guides and translators. Not one fur would have made it to Europe without the intervention of Native trappers and the consensual trade of the Indians. Little westward exploration would have taken place without the consent of the people of the straits, and almost certainly no posts would have been built in the heart of Indian county that could provision and protect unwelcome travelers. The French were there because the Anishinaabeg wanted them there.

Boom.

I've been recently reading a translation of War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe After the Great War, edited by Robert Gerwarth and John Horne. Usually I prefer to read in English, but this one I found really cheap in my native tongue and I just had to buy it. Now I have read like, half of the book, but so far it has been really good and to be honest, the research it contains has surprised me a few times.

First half of the book is about revolution (far left) and counter-revolution (far right) in different countries. First chapter was about political violence in Russian Civil War and all that chaos caused by dozen warring factions really struck me. After the country was torn by the great war and Tsar's ineffective administration, after population had suffered years of scarcity and hunger, it's no surprise how violence was so brutal and widespread. In a way, it made me think that if whole world would be similar in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic situation. Next time I'm writing post apocalyptic fiction, I'm going to get my inspiration from Russian Civil War, hah. Also chapters regarding political violence in defeated Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire taught me a lot about those times, even more about the causes behind antisemitism which we all know led to huge tragedies two decades later.

I have to continue the book as soon as possible, but I'm already thinking where should I continue after? I'm very much interested in the first world war, but time between the wars is becoming one of the most intriguing historical periods for me. Especially role of women interests me, especially in conflicts and warfare.

I was pleased to see that Rodric Braithwaite's Armageddon and Paranoia has been published. I helped with the fact-checking on it — it is really quite an excellent, tidy history of the Cold War, written from the perspective of the former British Ambassador to Moscow. Recommended reading if you are interested in something wide-ranging and thoughtful; I was surprised by how much I learned from it, given that the author is not an academic researcher.