Justinian's Flea

The Economist has a mixed review of William Rosen's Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. Some highlights:

Mr Rosen argues his position methodically and thoughtfully. He has a lot of ground to cover and he will not be rushed. So there are chapters not only on Justinian and the plague but also on the migration of the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Huns; on Byzantine architecture; on Roman law; on China and the silkworm; and on the emergence of Islam...

At this point, thumbing the remaining 200 or so pages to come, one begins to wonder whether the whole thing might be somewhat overlong and overdone. There is no sense of its having been padded—just a slightly crushing abundance of riches, of multiple lines of inquiry, to every one of which Mr Rosen gives his close attention...“Justinian's Flea” reads like several books in one and the glut is, by the end, a little hard to digest.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When on Google Earth 28

Image
Welcome, WOGErs, to my lonely, neglected history blog. Thanks to Andrea, the winner of WOGE 26, for presenting me with low-hanging fruit . Below: Something a bit more obscure. First, though, the boilerplate: Q: What is When on Google Earth? A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go! Q: How do you play it? A: Simple, you try to identify the site in the picture. Q: Who wins? A: The first person to correctly identify the site, including its major period of occupation, wins the game. Q: What does the winner get? A: The winner gets bragging rights and the chance to host the next When on Google Earth on his/her own blog! Two very general hints, for starters: 1. This site is pre-modern. 2. This site is open and easily accessible to the public.
Read more

Porta Salaria

Image
Salarian Gate, Rome Buses, scooters and Smart Fortwos roll through a breach in Aurelian's wall as wide as any made by the 19th century artillery that ended the last vestige of the Papal States . Their drivers meet only a little less resistance than the Italian army did when they blasted through , a few hundred feet to the east. The Salarian Gate didn't survive the onslaught, and when they cleared the rubble, it revealed the tomb of an 11-year-old poet laureate. In 94, Sulpicius Maximus won a poetry contest held in honor of Jupiter Capitolinus, but the light of his fame burned too briefly to prevent him from being lost under a pylon two centuries later. His monument was whisked off to the Capitoline Museum, and a replacement for the old gate was erected soon after. It, in turn, gave way to the march of progress in 1921; room had to be made for bigger things than salt merchants' carts. Now there's an enormous gap that would have horrified the city's anc
Read more

A still-wandering warlord

My slow journey to the completion of a MA in history is leading me, this semester, through the Protestant Reformation and its attendant upheavals. As someone who has taken every opportunity offered by his program requirements to focus on the third through seventh centuries, with occasional forays into earlier times, I approached this seminar with a certain amount of trepidation. Here was the far side of the bridge spanning the great, fermenting river that is medieval history. I have spent the bulk of my studies pawing through the silt of that river's near side, marveling over found gewgaws and sometimes pausing to wonder how, or whether, eddies near the shore affected the greater flow of the river. The task of crossing to the opposite bank and appreciating its landscape promised to take me well outside my comfort zone. You might imagine my surprise when, in the midst of Luther's screeds and classic studies of the period , I encountered a man whose mark on the historical re
Read more