ABSTRACT
In her American Historical Association presidential address of 1987, Katherine Fischer Drew (1987:803-812) complained of a tendency of historians to concentrate on detail at the expense of the larger view of events affecting the broad scope of history in the Western world. In succeeding years, however, the impulse to achieve that breadth has generated a number of excellent books dealing with the sweep of events carrying the Mediterranean world from Roman into medieval times. For the Late Empire as well, in books treating different aspects of history and society during the years AD 400 to 800, historians return again and again to that important change from ancient to medieval society in Western Europe. The reasons for this change have been discussed frequently in the sixty years since Henri Pirenne proposed that it was the isolation imposed by the Arab conquest of much of the Mediterranean littoral which led to the great shift from Romanism to medieval society, and there have been divergent approaches to the issue. While few today accept the details of Pirenne’s thesis, the approach he took to the problem has been at the heart of much of the discussion of the centuries during which the Germanic monarchies dominated the West, and many writers have made their interpretations in economic terms.
