Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (The Middle Ages Series) [Paperback]

Barbara M. Kreutz (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Middle Ages Series | Publication Date: January 1, 1996

Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans, Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Meditteranean society, where the Roman past and Lombard-Germanic culture met Byzantine and Islamic civilization, creating a rich and unusual mix.

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About the Author

Barbara M. Kreutz was Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (January 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812215877
• ISBN-13: 978-0812215878
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #595,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Are You in the Dark?, March 11, 2008

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This review is from: Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (The Middle Ages Series) (Paperback)

The darkest thing about the so-called Dark Ages is the darkness of our ignorance of them. I'm speaking in general of educated readers, many of whom will be surprised to learn that there was a "Norman Conquest" outside of England, and of the best historians, whose ignorance is directly proportioanl to the scarcity of reliable sources.

Yes, there was a Norman Conquest of Sicily, and then of large chunks of the boot of Italy, and the Norman kingdom which resulted is well worth studying for its importance in the expansion of Europe. But this book plunges even farther back into the darkness, to examine the state of things in southern Italy before the Normans, in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. The author writes: "In this early medieval period, southern Italy was in effect a giant laboratory, one in which polities were tested and where Byzantium, the Lombards, the Islamic world, and the Latin West constantly intersected." In other words, much of the interfacing of European, Byzantine, and Persian-Arab knowledge and technology that we Western European historians have studied so carefully in Renaissance Spain and northern Italy had already been previewed in southern Italy. Another quote from Dr. Kreutz: "...the lower half of the Italian peninsula...first became a separate and distinct geopolitical region in 774, with the Carolingian conquest of northern Italy. It is true that it was not politically unfified until the late eleventh century, under the Normans. From 774 on, however, southern Italy mostly pursued its own separate destiny, and indeed, as the Kingdom of Naples, it continued to do so until the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century."

This is not a book that makes concessions to a popular readership. It's all solid scholarship and stolid prose. Much of its drama focuses on the reliability of monastic sources. So, unless you're a Calabrian nationalist, why should you give a hoot? Because this fragmented and triangulated region was probably the most important gateway/marketplace through which Greeks, Muslims, and Latin-German Christians exchanged ideas! It was through this region, for instance, that Indian numerals using zero entered Europe. Most of the flow of knowledge was into Europe from Byzantium and North Africa, to the very great long-term detriment of the Islamic world. Frankly (and there's a pun), Europe was receptive while Islam was beginning its long exclusion of infidel science.

Benevento, the inland southern capital of Lombard Italy, is not much of a tourist destination these days, but it was a city of greater sophistication in the 9th C than anywhere north of Rome. Its liturgical music has been imaginatively reconstructed by Marcel Peres on his CD of Beneventan chant. Amalfi, the Lombard/Greek city state on the seacoast, is indeed a spectacular place to visit today, though most of its architecture dates from well after the Lomabards. There are good reasons to suppose that Amalfi was a hub of exchange of musical and poetic styles, north and south, long before the Spanish court of Alfonso el Sabio. Somehow, in southern Italy, the characteristic instruments of both Islamic and European music encountered each other and re-absorbed the dominant Hellenic instruments. The basic double reed of ancient Greece, for example, became the shenai of Arab/Persian music and the shawm>oboe of European. Translations of ancient Greek texts also flowed through pre-Norman and Norman Italy - translations from Greek to Arabic to Latin and also some from Latin to Arabic, though Arabs were almost never the translators.

Only readers with a general knowledge of Mediterranean history over the millennia will find this book intelligible. Still, if you are a person who reads history regularly for pleasure, you won't find many books with more new knowledge to impart.