Reviews 423

J. M. WALIACE-HADRIIA, The Barbarian West, JfiO-1000. (Hutchinson's University Library.) Lon-

don, 1952. Pp. vii, 157. $2.25.
THIS is another volume in the excellent series edited by Sir Maurice Powicke and
merits enthusiastic recommendation to both the scholar and the informed general
reader. The author, a fellow and tutor of Merton College in Oxford, has pre-
sented his interesting material in a clear and precise manner, giving us a book
which is a model of compression. Its particular value for the general reader is
that it presents in simple terms the way in which our western culture was pre-
served during the barbarian incursions into the late Roman empire. A careful
reading of this little volume will aid him to understand both why the West is a
unit and also why that unitary ideal has been so hard to realize in time and
space.
One of the fascinating features of the book is the story of how the barbarians
one after the other continued to live as barbarians and yet think that they were
Romans. The vivid contrast stands at the beginning and the end of the period
and gives unity to it.
The author successfully attempts to view the questions which confronted the
late Roman empire and the subsequent barbarian incursions from their point
of view and not ours, a position which all historians have not taken. He has
asked the right questions and we know that it is as important to ask the right
questions as to find appropriate answers.
Of particular interest was the point made again and again that as long as the
Eastern emperor sat on his throne in Constantinople he was to some extent re-
garded as the Roman emperor in the West. He was consulted from time to time,
and those chieftains in the West who had his support were considered in a stronger
position than those without it.
First the imperium Romanum and then the imperium Christianum exercised a
strange fascination upon the barbarians in the west, and the results of that
fascination — one might almost be tempted to call it preoccupation — together
with the encouragement given by the church and the monasteries to preserve
the laws and literature of the classical period, go far to account for the width of
the bridge that has been preserved between the Late Roman Empire and the
mediaeval world.
An excellent and up to date bibliography enables the student to do further
reading stimulated by the text.
R. D. RICHARDSON
Concord, Mass.