A history of the Dark Ages in Europe challenges popular beliefs while drawing on archaeological findings to profile a robust culture from which strong Christian kingdoms emerged, a civilization that demonstrated significant achievements in technology, commerce, education, and the arts.

A rich and surprising look at the robust European culture that thrived after the collapse of Rome. The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only ways of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter Wells, one of the world’s leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts.

Similarly, it's hard not to love this book, which employs a diverse cast of characters ranging from C.S. Lewis and Emily Dickinson to Lily Munster and the Great Pumpkin to reveal the historical, hilarious, and even holy origins of the words we use, even though many of us have forgotten what they mean. Join Professor Esolen on this fun yet educational romp through 98 of your soon to be favorite words. *Learn how and why (to say nothing of when and where) to properly use the word"drunken." (Hint: not to relay the fact that..."The bridegroom's mother has drunken awhole bottle of champagne, and is now drawing flowers on the floor with her lipstick.") *Appreciate why you don't want Lily Munster to dust your furniture...at least not in theKing's English. *And seethe, along with Esolen and other lovers of beauty in language and liturgy, whenyou see how a mighty angel of God is reduced to the status of a mere messenger boythrough bad word choices. Again and again, you'll find yourself agreeing with Esolen, who, channeling his inner Boris Badunov (Bullwinkle the Moose's nemesis, for the philistines and milennials among you), reminds us that " Eees good to know grammar. Eees delight, to play with style. Eees, no?" Yes, it is! And it also edifying to see just how rooted our language is in the Christian faith, as rooted as once was our culture. Esolen's delightful tour of the English language and its roots gives us a window into our shared heritage that sadly we've largely forgotten. We won't tell you what the word referenced in the first sentence above is... but don't be it. Buy this book. You'll be glad you did.

Beginning in the Stone Age and continuing through the collapse of the Roman empire, a fascinating exploration of the increasing complexity, technological accomplishments, and distinctive practices of the non-literate peoples known as Barbarians. We often think of the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome as discrete incubators of Western culture, places where ideas about everything from government to art to philosophy were free to develop and then be distributed outward into the wider Mediterranean world. But as Peter Bogucki reminds us in this book, Greece and Rome did not develop in isolation. All around them were rural communities who had remarkably different cultures, ones few of us know anything about. Telling the stories of these nearly forgotten people, he offers a long-overdue enrichment of how we think about classical antiquity. As Bogucki shows, the lands to the north of the Greek and Roman peninsulas were inhabited by non-literate communities that stretched across river valleys, mountains, plains, and shorelines from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. What we know about them is almost exclusively through archeological finds of settlements, offerings, monuments, and burials—but these remnants paint a portrait that is just as compelling as that of the great literate, urban civilizations of this time. Bogucki sketches the development of these groups’ cultures from the Stone Age through the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, highlighting the increasing complexity of their societal structures, their technological accomplishments, and their distinct cultural practices. He shows that we are still learning much about them, as he examines new historical and archeological discoveries as well as the ways our knowledge about these groups has led to a vibrant tourist industry and even influenced politics. The result is a fascinating account of several nearly vanished cultures and the modern methods that have allowed us to rescue them from historical oblivion.