TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gilmour, Nathan P.
T1  - Rome is never far away : a review of The Middle Ages by Johannes Fried : [Rezension zu:] The Middle Ages. By Johannes Fried (trans. Peter Lewis). 632 pp. Harvard University Press. $35.00
T2  - The Christian Humanist
N2  - Johannes Fried saves the programmatic aim of his book for the last chapter, but I’ll begin with it: unlike their counterparts in China or India or really any other center of historical civilizations, Europe has a particular disdain neither for its oldest period nor for the most recent but for the middle age (507).  Some, and Fried chooses his countryman Immanuel Kant as their chief, regard the middle ages as an age lacking in the beauty of the ancient world and without the dedication to reason that his modern counterparts share.  He holds Gothic architecture in particular contempt (506).  Just as bad, Fried notes, are those who would romanticize the middle ages, ignoring the truly radical thought of characters like Meister Eckhart and William of Ockham, whose philosophical explorations set the stage for the most radical thought of what Kant would regard as his own era’s Enlightenment (508).  In his masterful book titled simply The Middle Ages, Fried begins with Boethius and wends his way to Machiavelli in a campaign against such dismissals and such flattening accounts, telling a tale of political thought and philosophical exploration and most importantly of complexity at every step, a journey through Western Europe’s middle millennium that encourages the reader to think of the period as a truly fruitful period of intellectual, political, and social transformation. ...
KW  - Boethius
KW  - Charlemagne
KW  - Dominicans
KW  - Franciscans
KW  - Holy Roman Empire
KW  - Johannes Fried
KW  - The Middle Ages
KW  - Vikings
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48776
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-487767
UR  - http://www.christianhumanist.org/2015/04/rome-is-never-far-away-a-review-of-the-middle-ages-by-johannes-fried
N1  - The Christian Humanist by Michial Farmer, David Grubbs, and Nathan Gilmour is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
IS  - 28 April 2015
PB  - The Christian Humanist
CY  - [s. l.]
ER  -