Julia Smith takes a new approach to an old question: what was Europe like in the centuries after the prevailing power -- Rome -- went away? Rome disappeared as a political entity in the west; the conventional date of 476 CE marks the year of the deposing of the last western Roman Emperor . Rome's powerful influence in Europe in the subsequent centuries was tempered and altered by the flowering of a new diversity, as local cultural phenomena proliferated and interacted with established practices and traditions. If the notion of the Dark Ages were not already moribund, Professor Smith dispels any remaining doubt.

What is truly new here is the methodology. This book is a cultural account, an anthropology of the post-Roman period. Its reads more like ethnography than history. It takes as its focus power structures, regional studies, gender history, and religious, social and cultural meanings. The result is a fresh, erudite reappraisal and vivifying of what was once seen as a barren inactive period. In Professor Smith's hands, we see it as anything but.