A History of the Middle Ages

A History of the Middle Ages
By Crane Brinton, John Christopher, and Robert Wolff
Published in 1955
1146 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 2/5

A History of the Middle Ages is a long boring survey history of the middle ages. I’ve had it in my iTunes library for several years, and could never bring myself to finish it, until now.

I generally don’t like survey histories, as they tend to be overly vague. Furthermore, I generally dislike old history books because they often have bad historiographies.

I didn’t really learn much. I was already very familiar with almost all of the contents of this book. While there were fascinating tidbits / nuggets here and there, the general thrust of the work wasn’t very interesting. One interesting little story I had not heard was that there is a Byzatnine Greek version of the story of Buddha.

The book is also quite disorganized. The chapters neither flow by topic, nor chronologically. As a result, the action can be quite hard to follow, even for an amateur medievalist.

The one positive thing is that the audiobook’s production is absolutely amazing. Charlton Griffin’s voice is amazing. The sound effects and music really make the book come to light. If it wasn’t for the high production quality of the audiobook, I would not have been able to finish it.

I cannot recommend this book.

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