Why should readers of Historical Materialism consider reading a book by a specialist in early-Italian history, containing 831 pages of text and dealing with Europe and the Mediterranean world between the fifth and ninth centuries AD? Framing the Early Middle Ages was awarded the Deutscher Memorial-Prize for 2006, which suggests that it may interest a wider audience than the fellow-medievalists Chris Wickham addresses in his Introduction. There, ‘you the reader’, is assumed to belong to a group of ‘experts’ who ‘often . . . know far more than I about a given set of materials’. [1] In the case of this reviewer, Wickham need have no such concerns, since my area of expertise lies in a historical period which opens nearly 900 years after his closes and with a country (Scotland) which he specifically excludes from discussion. [2] My purpose here will therefore not be to dispute with Wickham over, for example, his explanation for why there are greater similarities between Syro-Palestinian and Italian ceramics than between either of these and ceramics of Egyptian origin. [3] Instead, I approach the book in the same way as most other nonspecialist readers of this journal: as a Marxist interested in what a fellow-Marxist has to say about a crucial, but deeply obscure turning-point in human history and what implications his work has for Marxist theory. As we shall see, his work is full of interest in both respects.

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Neil Davidson

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