Jacques Le Goff, one of the most brilliant and influential medievalists of the past 100 years, has become the court historian of the European Union. In this book, he aims to demonstrate “the thesis that it was in the Middle Ages that Europe first appeared and took shape both as a reality and as a representation” (1). European Union politicians have blurbed the volume positively, claiming that it explains “the shaping of Europe and its identity and diversities” (Neil Kinnock) and that its “themes and ideas … reverberate through the arguments of the twenty-first century” (Christopher Patten). The book is part of a series called “The Making of Europe” whose general editor is Le Goff himself. In other words, The Birth of Europe is an intellectual foundation charter in a chartulary that authenticates the European Union. Like most medieval charters, while it reveals intriguing details, it is also formulaic and cryptic. It is as much a guide for future action as a record of the past.

In this book, men and women did not create Europe. Instead, many previous and proto-Europes accumulated until the current one appeared, like a hill built of layers of soil over an ancient site of human habitation. Le Goff diagrams the strata of Europe's past, beginning with the barbarian invasions of the fourth through eighth centuries. According to his report, Germanic newcomers brought to the dissolving Roman Empire both ethnic diversity and religious unity. Although they maintained discrete tongues and cultures, by converting to Christianity they helped create the idea of a supraterritorial entity. Le Goff points out that the literate few of the early medieval period rarely used the word Europa. If the details of a later Europe emerged—kingdoms, legal codes, and new concepts of time and space—then no one recognized them.

Chapter 1 thus sets up one premise of the book: during the long centuries of the Middle Ages, inhabitants from Sicily to northern Ireland attempted but never quite achieved a coherent Europe. Sometimes they consciously aimed for unification, as Charlemagne and his successors did in the ninth and tenth centuries. Charlemagne organized kingdoms into an empire but acted “contrary to any true idea of Europe” (29) by trying to force Frankish ways upon diverse peoples. However, the Carolingians, too, unwittingly contributed to a later, more authentic Europe by suggesting such useful concepts as legal unity, monastic organization, and the French-German axis that became the historical backbone of Europe, for better or worse.

Phase 3 brought the end of the first Christian millennium and one more important layer of the historical dirt pile that became Europe: the possibility of continental stability suggested by the short-lived Peace of God movement. By thinking up ways to avoid war, leaders of kingdoms and churches came close to transcending old tribal divisions. At the same time, some writers began to use the term “Europe” to mean both a stretch of territory and a concept. As Le Goff explains in another of the book's recurring themes, the idea of Europe overlapped unfortunately with the earlier idea of Christendom. Once Europeans began to define themselves as a group bound by more than local loyalties, they were able to identify and persecute outsiders. And, as they became better at collective survival during subsequent centuries of economic takeoff, they vented the stress of success by identifying and persecuting out-groups. Hence, crusades and pogroms.

Europe was still not a sure thing by 1200, but the continent's inhabitants did make it more likely by improving agricultural technology, increasing their populations, and creating markets and money. They argued about secular and religious political authority, thus introducing the discrete concepts of church and state. With their worship of the Virgin Mary they even began to consider humanism; their reverence for the mother of God also improved conditions for women. Europeans finally began to get it right, however, in the thirteenth century, the “high point of the medieval West” (99). Towns grew in size and complexity, eventually yielding a modern continent of cities and suburbs. Long-distance trade made its merchants crucial to an increasingly urban culture, so that modern Europeans now have self-government, taxes, the bourgeoisie, and class hierarchy. Churchmen finally organized themselves into universities and began thinking logically; thus, thanks to Abelard, later came Descartes and Gramsci. Mendicants brought new forms of spirituality that led ultimately to modern Christianity. This was a time of many Europes: the Europe of merchants (112), of Christian mandarins (126), political speeches (140), work (141), censorship (142), hospitals (143), laymen (143), Gothic architecture (144), good manners (147), gastronomy (152), and the Europe of the individual (153).

Alas, the fourteenth was not such a good century. Famine, war, and plague were serious downers in this 100 years. National warfare got under way, thanks to professional armies and new military technologies. Everyone thought about death a lot. Worst of all, Europeans took their despair out on those increasingly visible out-groups such as Jews, women, and witches (so much for the Blessed Virgin's impact). They also worried about the Turks because (a) Turks were not Christian and (b) they kept trying to invade. Still, Europeans also dreamed of a peacefully united continent—Nicholas of Cusa proposed ecumenicism and tolerance for other religious traditions, Pawel Wlodkowic advocated civil rights for non-Christians, and the king of Bohemia suggested a European assembly of nations.

The Middle Ages did not end with the Renaissance, as Le Goff points out in conclusion. There were too many Middle Ages for them to end all at once, and several renaissances preceded the early modern Big R. In many important ways, the Middle Ages lasted until, and after, New World discoveries, industrial and republican revolutions, and the accomplishment of the separation of church and state. Although citizens of Europe could conceive of themselves collectively by 1500, they were not sure of their borders, nor of what they shared. Le Goff suggests, in another of the book's main themes, that the biggest threat to Europe on the brink of modernity was internal strife. He also notes, in finishing, that the great discovery of medieval Europeans was time—economic time, yes, but also the time of history and historicity. Europe was born in the Middle Ages because medieval Europeans created the teleology that historians still operate by today.

Like the best works of twentieth-century historiography, including his own masterful articles and other books, Le Goff often makes perspectives that the rest of us never even considered seem true and obvious. When he reminds us of forgotten and underestimated men such as Gregory the Great, or when he casts Charlemagne as a predecessor of Hitler, Le Goff does not fear to judge the past. When he describes eleventh-century Europe as two regions, one of wine and one of beer, he uses that familiar Annaliste mind trick of proving political and cultural realities with mentalités. His enthusiasm for the thirteenth century, with all its energy, innovation, and false starts, is truly infectious. Despite his devotion to European union, Le Goff still writes as a Frenchman. He relies on compatriots for most of his bibliography. He laments the infiltration of English into continental life: “Linguistic multiplicity is preferable by far,” he declares, than “if English or any other European language were to become the language of Europe” (136). In what might be the most interesting part of the book, the topical bibliography, his choice of subheadings is instructive: dance, nature, images, and time, along with the more predictable feudalism, Jews, towns, and women.

Ultimately, though, the book reads less like a sensitive interpretation of medieval ideals than shorthand notes for a future Europe. This is not the Middle Ages of Time, Work, and Culture (1980) or The Birth of Purgatory (1991). Le Goff once wrote brilliantly and sympathetically of Jules Michelet, his predecessor in the business of history. Michelet defined several different Middle Ages as he grew disillusioned with his own contemporary politics, shifting from a glorious celebration of marvelous apparitions in his pre-Commune youth to a dark, Luciferian Middle Ages in his waning years. “Michelet's Middle Ages,” Le Goff wrote, “are apparently part of his most literary and least `scientific' side” (“The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet,” in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 3). This is true, too, of Le Goff's Birth of Europe. He wrote it in 2002 and 2003 as Europeans debated a constitution based on their common heritage. The book's momentum carries its readers surely toward that Europe of the twenty-first century, where bourgeois governments composed of conscientious individuals speaking many languages are eager to preserve an egalitarian multicultural federation of nations. This medieval Europe is merely a preface to current European obsessions with modernity and its politics.

“Existence is linked to naming,” Le Goff declares (5), but the French and Dutch, who voted recently not to ratify a European constitution, might disagree. Europe exists on maps, in geography classes, and in historical name but not as a coherent legal, economic, or political entity. Le Goff is one of our greatest European historians, but his Middle Ages did not give birth to Europe. Instead, medieval writers created a historiographical tradition that has dominated European self-retrospection, more imaginaire than histoire. The French title of the book phrases Le Goff's thesis as a question (L’Europe est-ell née au moyen âge?) rather than an assertion. The right answer is that no one knows yet.