So I've been reading this book The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. Actually I bought it like 6 months ago and only read the beginning before getting sidetracked by another book, and I've just now picked it back up two chapters in. I have to confess my main interest on buying it was the first few chapters that seemed to offer an ethnography of ancient Europe. (I am pretty sure the author wouldn't be pleased with that. But I'm not uninterested in the rest of the book, which deals with the origins and growth of the ideas of race and whiteness.) The first two chapters did describe the many cultures of Europe in antiquity and the early middle ages, although not in great detail, which is understandable since it's just the basis for a more focused discussion of race. But the third chapter, which covers white slavery, approached medieval history in such an off-the-cuff way that I can't really let it go. While I did learn quite a bit about unfree labor in the middle ages, there were glaring errors in Painter's descriptions of the medieval world. She calls the raiders who captured the man who would later be known as Saint Patrick, “vikings,” while identifying St. Patrick as having lived in the 5th century AD. This was before the explosion of attacks by Norsemen across Western Europe, and their settlement in Ireland. The raiders who brought Patrick to Ireland were most likely Irish, not Norsemen, as Irish marauders frequently attacked the west coast of Britain in the decades following the departure of the Roman Legions in 410 (Scotland is named for the ones who settled there). And then she attributes the unification of England (to the extent that any feudal land could be called united) and the routing of the Vikings to the Norman Conquest. Never mind that William the Conqueror invaded England he attacked a country that was already united under one king (a process begun by Alfred the Great in the 9th century, almost 200 years before the William's arrival), or that the English King Harold's forces had moved south to meet William after delivering the Norsemen in England their final defeat at Stamford Bridge. Apparently those easily available facts are not important enough to get right. These are the sort of factual errors that make me feel like a jerk, and a colossal nerd, for pointing out, but this stuff still matters to me. They don't actually weaken the author's argument at all (and dates and labels really aren't the substance of academic history), but it would have been so easy not to make them. It frustrates me that accuracy in medieval history can be so unimportant to someone who doesn't work with it primarily. I don't expect a detailed analysis of the unification of the smaller English kingdoms, but when touching on it briefly, it would be nice if the author didn't attribute it to the wrong person. And this was a high-profile book, so it disappoints me to see even such a small misrepresentation of events in it. I'm developing the hypothesis that it's the notion of the period as a "dark age" that encourages people to assume that a vague or fuzzy description of events will suffice. I don't know if I could prove this, but I think it's a plausible explanation. In any case, would it be so hard to check your medieval facts?
p.s. Here's an interesting, if old, article on the significance of St. Patrick's enslavement:
