Heart of Europe
The Holy Roman Empire lasted a thousand years, far longer than ancient Rome. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. Voltaire distilled the disdain of generations when he quipped it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet as Peter Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empire tells a millennial story of Europe better than the histories of individual nation-states. And its legacy can be seen today in debates over the nature of the European Union. Heart of Europe traces the Empire from its origins within Charlemagne's kingdom in 800 to its demise in 1806. By the mid-tenth century its core rested in the German kingdom, and ultimately its territory stretched from France and Denmark to Italy and Poland. Yet the Empire remained stubbornly abstract, with no fixed capital and no common language or culture. The source of its continuity and legitimacy was the ideal of a unified Christian civilization, but this did not prevent emperors from clashing with the pope over supremacy -- the nadir being the sack of Rome in 1527 that killed 147 Vatican soldiers. Though the title of Holy Roman Emperor retained prestige, rising states such as Austria and Prussia wielded power in a way the Empire could not.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
3mentions
3people
2017–2020years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > It's parallel to what I've heard about the trouble with history bring. You just never know exactly where to start.
Mathematics offers an opportunity here that history doesn't: there is a definite starting point, namely, the axioms. Not every course can or should start at the axioms, but it is there as an option, as it isn't with history.
Even so, this point is a very interesting one. I hated history in grade school, but then stumbled upon Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while browsing the shelves one day. It hooked me, but made reference to a lot of WWI history that I didn't know, so I started reading about WWI history. But, to understand the antipathies in WWI, you have to go back even further in European history ….
This hunt backwards for first causes has led me to Wilson's Heart of Europe, which traces the history of the Holy Roman Empire. It's a struggle, because it's much more on the scholarly than the popular side of things to which I am accustomed, but I'm engaged in it because it's helping me answer questions that I posed, rather than ones that my history teachers both posed and, all too soon, answered.
I think that the best education, lies or no, is the one that both leaves students asking their own questions, and equips them with the tools to seek out the answers to those questions themselves.
- During the past six months I have been challenged intellectually and aesthetically by these works:
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol 1-3, by Werner Jaeger
Diary by Witold Gombrowicz
Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach by Sedgewick
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk
Tomie: No Use Escaping by Junji Ito
L’homme aux cercles by Fred Vargas
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong.
The Weird by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
The Federalist Papers, ed. by Kesler
The Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. by Ketcham
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, new translation by John Woods
Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman
Loren Eiseley in the Library of America Edition
Tu rostro mañana by Javier Marías
The Complete Essays by Michel De Montaigne, translation by Screech
Earning The Rockies by Kaplan
Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
Nature Stories by Jules Renard
Mac y su contratiempo by Enrique Vila-Matas
Olinger Stories by John Updike
Greek Science in Antiquity by Marshall Clagett
At The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
100 Diagrams That Changed The World by Scott Christianson
Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by Peter Wilson
Alec "The Years Have Pants" by Eddie Campbell
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
- Here are a few that come to mind right now:
Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East by Amanda H Podany - Covers how international relations worked between the different rulers of the Ancient Near East. Covers different things and in a different way than I had heard in a lot of other ANE history.
Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos by Jonah Keri - Lots of fun, interesting stuff about a sport I like and a team I didn't know too much about.
Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Noel Malcolm - This one is really good, covering the history of a single family amidst the relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian world.
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox - Another excellent book, this discussing how Linear B was deciphered, with particular emphasis placed on Alice Kober, whose work was largely overlooked since she died before Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it.
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor - This one won the Pulitzer for history in 2014, so that should tell you something. This book covers an aspect of history I had never heard before, with a lot of focus on slaves themselves, rather than their owners or the people around them. The roles of the British as liberators and slaves as their aids in the War of 1812 is very interesting.
And one last one that I'm currently reading is Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by Peter H. Wilson. I haven't finished it yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's very interesting to hear about a large aspect of European history I wasn't too familiar with and that doesn't fit into the neat, centralized nation-state based history of the world that is predominantly taught.
