Europe in the High Middle Ages

By: William Chester Jordan

Narrated by: Leon Nixon

It was an age of hope and possibility, of accomplishment and expansion. Europe's High Middle Ages spanned the Crusades, the building of Chartres Cathedral, Dante's Inferno, and Thomas Aquinas. Buoyant, confident, creative, the era seemed to be flowering into a true renaissance - until the disastrous 14th century rained catastrophe in the form of plagues, famine, and war.

In Europe in the High Middle Ages, William Chester Jordan paints a vivid, teeming landscape that captures this lost age in all its glory and complexity. Here are the great popes who revived the power of the Church against the secular princes; the writers and thinkers who paved the way for the Renaissance; the warriors who stemmed the Islamic tide in Spain and surged into Palestine; and the humbler estates, those who found new hope and prosperity until the long night of the 1300s. From high to low, from dramatic events to social structures, Jordan's account brings to life this fascinating age.

©2001 William Chester Jordan (P)2019 Tantor

More than just kings and battles

This is an exccellent recap of a formative yet challenging period of European history. It adequately covers the usual "kings and battles" that have typically been the only topics reviewed in histories of anywhere and anytime, but also provides wonderful descriptions of the day-to-day life of peasants and other non-aristocrats and broader cultural trends.

A fascinating yet disconnected history

The Good: Broad scope and focuses on some interesting people, events and developments in High Medieval Europe

The Bad: Fails to sketch an overarching narrative of what makes the High Middle Ages a distinct historical period. Feels jumpy and disconnected at times. Narration was mediocre, lots of mispronounced words.

Awful choice of voice actor and mediocre history

The history is okay, but with none of the life of Peter Brown’s analogous history of the early dark ages (Rise of Western Christendom). The chronology is difficult to follow and some of the facts are wrong or highly misleading.

The choice of narrator is really mind boggling on the part of the production agency. This isn’t the narrator’s fault since not everyone needs to know about the Middle Ages but why on earth would they choose a narrator for this who knows so little about the Middle Ages that he can’t pronounce: "bishopric," "scholasticism" (scholatitism), "theological," and countless other simple words ubiquitous in a book about the high Middle Ages. It's not just distracting mispronunciations, but narrator's emphases on the sentences is frequently wrong, making it hard to tell what the sentence is supposed to mean.

This isn’t as botched as Brown’s “Through the Eye of a Needle,” but it is close.

A Weak Link in a Very Good Series

William Chester Jordan's "Europe in the High Middle Ages" is a decent enough review of developments in Europe from the 11th through the 14th centuries. However, unlike the first several volumes (chronologically) of the series, it suffers from the "once over lightly" problem common to many historical surveys. The one exception to this shortcoming is in the area of Jordan's specialty, religion. In that field, one gets a genuine sense of the role the Catholic Church played in the political, social, and yes, religious, lives of the various European peoples.

I would be remiss in my review if I failed to note the frankly terrible quality of the narration, by Leon Nixon. It's not that the timbre of his voice is so bad, though there is a slight reading-to-children aspect to it, somewhat akin to Mr Rogers. Rather, it's his unending mispronunciation of word after word after word, some of which might be expected to be unfamiliar (though I would expect that, between the narrator and the director, they would have figured out even the hard words), but many of which are frankly ordinary words. In a series of the quality of "The Penguin History of Europe," they should do better.

I most appreciated the short essay on the Beguines.

The narrator mispronounced an astonishingly wide array of words in every language, including English. And at such a lumbering pace I had to set the playback speed to 1.10. Why such incompetence should be tolerated is beyond me.