Review from previous edition This book is a masterpiece of condensed exposition. It is also a break-through - a truly New Cultural History - in the quiet determination of the author to approach very old themes from angles refreshingly different from those from which they have usually been approached ... It is, above all, the first complete account of the ... Read moreearly middle ages as a civilisation in its own right. It catches the living texture of western Europe, from Rome to the Hebrides, for a half millennium of its history. It is truly the study of a civilization in its entirity ... Reading Europe After Rome I was constantly reminded of another synthesis of genius which now lies at the root of the modern study of the high middle ages - that is, Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages ... It was a 'Portrait of an Age'. Julia Smith has done the same for the half millennium which preceded Southern's Middle Ages.
Professor Peter Brown, Princeton University
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