I recently met my guest on this programme – Chris Wickham – at All Souls College, Oxford where he is Emeritus Chichele Professor of Medieval History. We met to discuss Chris’s recent book which tackles the thousand-year sweep of medieval European history: ‘the middle ages that the 21st century needs to know about’, in the words of one reviewer.
As you can see from the quotation from the interview (below or left, depending on the device you are reading this on), Chris is not afraid to criticise the shortcomings of previous accounts. In the interview you can hear how his middle ages differs from those.
Other aspects of the book we talked about include why Chris feels that previous general accounts of the middle ages are fundamentally flawed; why following the money is a good tactic in trying to understand how medieval power operated; how he selected three particularly remarkable individuals to explore the lot of medieval women; and why he homes in on the early 12th century to locate the fascinating emergence of the public intellectual in the persons of close contemporaries Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard.