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booklog

Booklog: Byzantium : the surprising life of a medieval empire
Byzantium : the surprising life of a medieval empire. Judith Herrin, 2007: published Penguin, 2008.

Read from 13th to 20th May.

I was very impressed by this. With the exception of a few chapters at the beginning and end, it's not a strict history of events; rather, it's a selection of chapters on a range of different topics, arranged in a rough chronological order. The topics are fairly widely chosen - six successive chapters, for example, talk about Greek fire, the medieval Byzantine economy, the status of eunuchs, the Imperial court, dynastic succession and the idea of porphyrogenitos, and Mount Athos. A useful result of this approach was that the book lent itself to intermittent reading - you could pick it up whilst cooking dinner or going to bed, run through a section and put it down without worrying about losing track of the overall thread.

The history it discusses, well. It's remarkable. I knew very little about Byzantine history; "this vague thing in the East that hung on a long time" was about the sum of it. In many ways, that's the strength of a book like this; the breadth and depth of what it covers, gives a real feel for what the empire was, its significance and its - well, its liveliness. There's a comment at the end about Byzantium always being thought of as this passive, decaying, rump of a state, and I think that's quite true; this very successfully challenges it. It's also a bit of a shock to the standard way of thinking about the period between about 400 and 1400; it's easy to fall into a trap of assuming that the piece of European history we know best is representative of the whole thing to some degree or another, and this really does confront you with the fact that that just doesn't work. So, thought-provoking, at least for someone like me whose pre-Renaissance history is vague at best.

One quibble would be that the last section - covering the sack of Byzantium in 1204 through to the fall to the Ottomans in 1453 - seemed a bit rushed, but I think this might be a reflection of my wanting to read more on the period rather than a systemic flaw.

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Okay, so. This writing-things-about-books lark is not going as well as I had intended. For the sake of keeping a record, things read but not written about (since two weeks ago):

• Dare to be a Daniel : then and now - Tony Benn
  
• Quantum theory : a very short introduction - J.C. Polkinghorne
  
• Poststructuralism : a very short introduction - Catherine Belsey
  
• Emotion : a very short introduction - Dylan Evans
  
• Music : a very short introduction - Nicholas Cook.

No, I don't know why I seem to only read books with colons in the title. Five others posted about, so ten over sixteen days, which is unexpectedly fast. (I read three and a half of them on the train in one day, though.)

A nice long weekend looms, and a trip to the far barren West, which means plenty of time to catch up. It's pleasant to have solid free time, with no computer, ahead of me...