Neither static nor stagnant.

I finished R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, from which I've already posted a few excerpts on this blog. The book is deliberately restricted to Latin Christendom between 972 and 1204, which means it's about the rise of only one part of medieval civilization. (I'll have to read books on Germany and the Slavic countries some other time.)

But there's still plenty of good material on some of the most interesting events and phenomena of European history. For example, there's Prester John, legendary Christian king of a distant empire, about whom legends began circulating in the twelfth century. There's a recounting of the sad, strange Fourth Crusade, where crusaders trying to get to Jerusalem ended up conquering Constantinople, which was at the time the greatest city in Christendom.

The main part book is structured on a set of organizational transformations: the thickening of hierarchies in both secular and religious organizations, and the new intellectual rigor that helped make these shifts possible. There are also some compelling discussions on medieval ideals, the most stirring of which were the descriptions of the feudal conception of liberty (worth studying as a contrast to our modern ideas) and of the admiration of Rome as a spiritual capitol (which faded as the papacy assumed a more active political role).

This book would not make a good first dip into medieval history: it assumes a basic knowledge of major events (the council of Clermont, the Battle of Hastings) and personalities (Gregory VII, Bernard of Clairvaux) of the period. There are many fascinating details about the historian's work: for example, one source for comparing styles of monastic poetry is a scroll that a monk carried across Europe to collect eulogies on. I really don't know how it's regarded in the field these days, and would be curious to find out. The book is well-sourced and doesn't seem to be pushing any conspicuously modern ideologies. The Making of the Middle Ages portrays early medieval society as dynamic and imaginative: an age with its share of troubles, to be sure, but neither a static time awaiting technology nor a stagnant era awaiting enlightenment.