The History of Medieval Europe

What Hacker News says

1. alexwassermanNov 2022
   Bright Ages (The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe https://a.co/d/0axSFSi) is a fantastic book on this. It highlights the growing, current historical view of continued European growth and development and not the post-Roman ruin.

   Basically it’s an anti-dark-age view that talks through specific examples or art, culture, science, etc through the period that’s typically called the dark ages (~400-1300AD)

   It was recommended by the always excellent ACOUP (https://acoup.blog) who’s often linked on HN too. This was the specific post covering Rome’s decline and fall and discussing the contrasting positions in academia on bright vs dark vs just continuing ages: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

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2. alex-moonDec 2025
   The History of Medieval Europe by Maurice Keen

   Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

   The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman

   I had a crack at reading the first Game of Thrones novel (I think it's just called A Game of Thrones) but my brain seems to be in non-fiction mode at the moment. I think I'm drawn to a kind of sweet spot halfway between "related to my everyday experience" and "removed from my everyday experience" - not sure I could read about programming or business at the moment, though I also haven't tried.

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3. ggmFeb 2022
   I'm reading the Cambridge history of medieval europe and it observes quite frequently that people had literal real fears of the afterlife, and that the word-is-my-bond thing had some immediate currency. Popes were able to issue directions to kings and dukes, which required them to do things, and without Stalin's "where is the pope's army" reality, they accepted the direction. [I personally suspect that the ability of the pope to use religious fervour to call on OTHER kings and dukes for an army probably heavily influenced things, but it would be wrong to deny the religious aspect. Life was short and brutal, and there was no evident tolerance for athiesm, at least as recorded in this kind of history. It took the later rennaisance and reformation for aspects of roman/greek atheism to enter the conversation, and christians were just as likely as any other faith to deny truths in other written works and destroy them]

   A belief that a kiss represented a bond, a contract, that the kiss itself was bound into the agreement, and represented a material part of the agreement does not surprise me. Nor, that it forms a bond of fealty, and to disrupt the ceremony required acceptance of a change in law.

   Remember this is a time where at least for the nobility, to swear on oath you didn't do something was in some circumstances sufficient to be found not guilty. High status people did embarrasingly public penance to get out of excommunication.

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