Continuity

[glenatron]

I've just been watching a programme about the Dark Ages on Channel 4 and it managed to avoid my current bugbears of modern documentary-making in that it wasn't laughably portentious (every wildlife documentary in the world seems to do this now) or obviously factually incorrect (like Channel 4's recent series on pagans) and really brought home the nature of disruptive historical shifts. The more I have read about history the more it seems that the standard idea of sudden and revolutionary change- the fall of Rome, the Saxon invasions, the Renaissance is pretty much mistaken. We are taught about history as a series of stages, steps along the road to our modern pinnacle of enlightenment. The more I have read around the subject- and I'm sure any real historians reading this will be far more acutely aware of this than I am- the thread I increasingly pick up on is that for most people, for most of the time, things didn't change terribly much. The sun rose, the sun went down, the crops grew or failed and whether Rome or a local Romano-Briton or a Saxon claimed ownership of the land you went on as you always had. Even the idea that much of the learning of Rome was lost after the fall and only regained in the Renaissance is largely mistaken- throughout the Dark Ages the people who had kicked the Romans out, or been abandoned by them, were trying to be more like them and recover something of the glory of Rome, while the imperial traditions continued in Byzantium and the eastern empire for many years afterwards and through it all trade continued right across europe. The ancient world was more connected and far more continuous than my gcse history lessons ever lead me to believe.

I suspect part of my fascination with this is because I have been reading quite a bit of historical fiction over the last year - rediscovering the Mary Sutcliffe books I loved when I was small and now rereading the intricate, devious and brilliantly researched novels of Dorothy Dunnett, who I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who wants a mixture of dramatic 15th century ( start with Nicolo Rising ) or 16th century ( start with The Game of Kings) action and plots so cunning I can't even find an amusing comparison for how cunning they are.