I feel like this book is often mentioned in the same breath as Herodotus’ Histories but holy cow is this book filled with inside baseball. Don’t get me wrong, Carlyle can turn a phrase, but I don’t know how lost I’d be without Wikipedia, which I find myself turning to every third sentence it seems.
I guess the upside is that I now have a vague understanding of who the Merovingians are and who Clovis, Pepin and Rollo are but Carlyle certainly didn’t care to enlighten me. I had to go down the wiki-rabbit-hole.
Reading his work feels like I’m sitting in a salon somewhere listening to Truman Capote give me all the sordid details without giving me any context. It’s very entertaining, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m learning much. Carlyle also seems, not unlike Capote to interject his own opinion of why things happened, often rhetorical, if that makes sense.
It feels like he’s writing to an upper-middle-class audience who would have studied Latin and Romance languages and have an in-depth knowledge of western history–which is fine , I guess, but does the going ever get smoother or will I constantly be reaching for other reference works just to keep the wheels from falling off?
by kellermeyer14
2 Comments
After a while, you will have learned quite a lot from constantly looking stuff up. Then you get to feel all smug when you see Rollo come up again and you go, oh, that guy. I know him
Clovis and Pepin are very famous and important names in French / Western European history. It doesn’t seem that odd to me that they’d be mentioned in a book about the French Revolution without giving much background information about them.