PositiveThe Washington PostIf you’ve never thought about the Middle Ages, or assumed it was too distant to be relevant, this book is a good place to start. Jones has a knack for gripping detail and vivid evocation ... Jones gives us a complex, ambivalent Middle Ages where East and West are deeply intertwined, and where you have to understand Islam, the Mongols, the steppe and the Baltics as much as the monasteries of Italy, the universities of France, the fortresses of Wales and the knights of, okay, everywhere ... None of his many stories have cardboard heroes or villains, only humans facing tough decisions ... organized chronologically around social groups that, at any given time, were enjoying a moment of prominence. This approach humanizes the past, but it also leaves out a lot of important people ... This is still an exclusively political and military history. Readers new to the Middle Ages might be left thinking that’s all there is ... These omissions weaken Jones’s overall mission; he really wants to convince us that the Middle Ages are worth our time and inform our era. Asterisks throughout the book reach for similarities with our own experiences...Some of these associations are more convincing than others ... he never acknowledges how extensively we already live with the Middle Ages, and he never tells us exactly why we should care. Where are we most like medieval people, and where are they unrecognizable to us? ... In an age when medieval culture is easily and explicitly repurposed for ill, we are lucky to have a book that insists on portraying Europe’s deep connections with other parts of the world and that wants to rehydrate the Middle Ages back from the flat, racist version. We are luckier still to have a book that narrates the past so thoroughly, vividly and joyfully. But writing a history of empire, pillage, bloodthirstiness and dogma cannot be done in a vacuum, ignoring the dark side of their appeal. Jones slightly underestimates his readers if he thinks it can.
