Taking Heaven by Violence (The Middle Ages in the Making of the West)

In grand narratives of Western Civilization, the Middle Ages pose a problem. On the one hand, the very concept of the medieval, from its first formulation, was deployed as a negative term imputing barbarism, ignorance, and superstition to the millennium intervening between idealized antiquity and the present moment. On the other hand, by the very logic of that same formulation, the Middle Ages are positioned at the heart of Western Civilization and its historical development. As a result of this ambivalent status of the Middle Ages, as both central experience and marginal anti-icon of the West, the place of the medieval millennium and its meaning to us (particularly in America) often remains unclear, ambiguous, even uncomfortable.  This present book–aimed at a dispositionally-conservative, non-specialist, American readership–attempts to clarify the meaning of the Middle Ages in the making of Western Civilization. In fifteen vivid chapters, written in an accessible and entertaining prose-style, I guide readers through a gallery of spectacles ranging from the desperate grip of battle, to the high corridors of sacred power, to the secret intimacies between man and woman, or man and God. As we proceed, I rely heavily on primary sources, through which I allow the medieval dead to appeal directly to the reader as witnesses to the vitality of their age. In this tour of the medieval millennium, it is my endeavor to show (rather than merely tell) the meaning of the Middle Ages: a new symbiosis between Germanic warriors and priests of St. Peter that made Europe.