February 3, 2024

I (do not) like big books, and I cannot lie

Reflecting back on The Bright Ages and giving people a "way in" to the past

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

When we were writing The Bright Ages, one of the things we had to think long and hard about was what "kind" of history book we wanted to write. This means, of course, a lot of things but perhaps first and foremost it meant making decisions about what to include and what would be left out - or, to put it another way, was this going to be a short book or a long book.

We chose the former.

The Bright Ages could have been a very different kind of book. We knew we wanted to tell an accessible story about a permeable medieval Europe, to (as we say) shine light on a period of history that spanned more than 1,000 years and touched at least 4 (but really maybe 5) continents. But we weren't sure at first how we wanted to tell that story. Indeed, our original Table of Contents in our proposal had at least 5 more chapters in it, and would have run probably 30,000 more words than it did. But we decided quite quickly that we might try a different method because we realized there was no way to cover everything. We wanted to invite people in, removing barriers whenever we could, and to produce a book that a reader might willingly read cover-to-cover.

But there are other ways we could have gone about it. There were other books that offered overviews of the European Middle Ages (though far fewer than you might think!) but the models we did have available to us were, we felt, were too much like textbooks. They aimed for comprehensiveness, to cover "everything," to derive the authority of their presentation from their sheer scale. This leads to the production of what are called "doorstoppers" - books so big they can hold doors open. Though book lengths are really measured by word counts, some of the most recent English-language surveys of the European Middle Ages intended for popular audiences come in at 656, 504, 632, and 464 pages respectively (and often with quite small text). The Bright Ages runs a very comfortably-spaced, wide-margined 336 pages.

Of course, both short and long books come with trade-offs; shorter books most visibly benefit from greater accessibility and lower price, while long books tend to be seen as having heavier gravitas and more authority. And in every case, every book leaves things out.

The late scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that all histories are bedeviled by 4 silencing moments:

1. At the moment of source creation

2. At the moment of archive creation

3. At the moment of narrative creation

4. At the moment of "retrospective significance" (or, maybe better, canon creation)

Not all of these silences, in all cases, have to be intentional. They can at times be inadvertent.

History books tend to participate in #3 and #4 here, in some different balance between them. Academic histories tend to deal more with #3 because they (not always but mostly) are determined to say something "new" using the sources from the past. Pop histories, however, tend to participate more in #4 by gathering narratives - other historical works that deal with sources and archives - and refining those narratives down into one. What doorstopper pop histories tend not to do, however, is to acknowledge the absences that pervade their pages. In fact, they quite often do the opposite and emphasize their "comprehensiveness."

Doorstopper popular histories are often gifted and shelved. They seem, by their heft, serious and substantial. Indeed, they mostly are serious and substantial! They aim - for very understandable sales and marketing reasons not always in the author's control - to be the book on the subject. And long books often sell very well - there's a whole market branded (problematically) as "dad history" that benefits from the presentation of heft in a book. And we think that if historians want to write long books for popular audiences, that's fantastic. But we should also be aware that perception of comprehensiveness is ultimately an illusion.

Shorter popular history books, by necessity, can't do that. And we see that as a virtue. Shorter pop history books need to function as hyperlinks, to acknowledge the vastness of what we know (and what we don't) about a topic. They need to tell a story that spins but then point out all the seeming silences that aren't, to other books and other scholarship that illuminates those dark places between the pages of the original book.

As Pascal famously said, writing short is very difficult. It's moreover not what historians are trained to do or to value in graduate school and in the profession. But given the consistent (right-wing and neoliberal) assault on history generally and medieval studies specifically, this is essential work to be done right now.

The good news is that in fact we are trained, secretly, to do this kind of work and evaluate whether it's done well, because it's how we teach. There is no 15-week class that covers everything of anything. We all know it, and we evaluate class construction not around comprehensiveness, but on whether they create a pathway for students to begin learning. This doesn't preclude assessing and criticizing courses for the choices reflected in a syllabus, we also do that all the time and rightly so!

And so bluntly: we'd suggest that pop history books need to be read. And these books need to be hors d'oeuvres - gateways into more books, more tv, more games, more history, (and ideally) more medieval.

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