"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin is a comprehensive and informative history of the city of Ravenna in Italy. Herrin's research is thorough, with a wealth of information about the city's architecture, art, and culture. The writing is clear and accessible, making this book a good choice for anyone interested in Italian history or art. However, at times the book can be a bit dry and academic, with a focus on minutiae that may not be of interest to all readers. Overall, "Ravenna" is a solid work of scholarship that is recommended for those with a specific interest in the subject matter.

Herrin's 'Ravenna' is a comprehensive and detailed look at the history of the ancient city of Ravenna. Herrin paints a vivid picture of the city's many layers of history, from its rise to prominence during the fall of the Western Roman Empire to its role as a crucible of European culture in the Middle Ages. Herrin does an excellent job of tying together the various threads of the city's story, from the political and religious dynamics of the time to the architectural and artistic heritage that continues to make Ravenna a destination today.

Herrin's writing style is clear and informative, and she does a great job of making the city's complex history accessible to a broad audience. Her research is thorough, and her sources are well-cited, making this an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning more about Ravenna's history. The book is also richly illustrated with photographs and maps, which enhance the reader's understanding of the city's history and significance in the development of European culture.

While the book may be difficult for those without a background in historical or religious studies, it is well worth the effort for anyone interested in Ravenna's history. All that said, I personally didn't enjoy reading it. I don't really know why I just found myself incredibly bored whilst reading it so my rating reflects that.

Review not posted anywhere else.

Inspired by the beautiful mosaics in Ravenna, Herrin set out to tell the story of the city in the 5th to 8th centuries. This is a fascinating account of how its strategic location gave rise to its significant role under Roman, Goth and finally Byzantine rule.

Ravenna does assume some prior knowledge (I had to resort to Wikipedia a couple of times) but it’s a fascinating account of the political, social and religious developments. It is lightened for the general reader by the dramatic lives of figures such as Galla Placidia, King Theoderic and Emperor Justinian. Herrin also gives the history and descriptions of the mosaics and buildings in the city (and what has been lost, including in bombing in the Second World War). The pictures in the book are beautiful!
*
I received a copy of Ravenna from the publisher via Netgalley.

A very enjoyable, readable and informative history of Ravenna. Well researched and put together with a lot of scope and information.

I knew very little about Ravenna going into the book and it certainly inspired me to learn more about Europe at that time along with Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire.

I own some of the authors other works but have not read them yet but this book has encouraged me to do so.

Highly recommended and you can judge a book by its cover.

Hope to visit Ravenna one day and enjoy visiting the places I have read about in this book.

Since receiving this advanced copy I did purchase the book on kindle and the matching audiobook on Audible, both the book and audiobook were a treat to enjoy.

The book explains how Ravenna, having developed from being a marshy outpost to capital of the western Roman Empire in 402, became the 'crucible of Europe' over a 350 year period up until 750.

Judith Herrin argues that this period shouldn't be perceived as a period of decline as it often is but rather one of great creativity and the period of early Christendom.

I have certainly learnt a great deal form the book and can't wait to have the opportunity to add Ravenna to the list of Italian cities that I have visited and enjoyed in the past.

Highly recommended.

I do remember some historical facts about Ravenna but I never read such a detailed and well research historical book about the city.
It was a fascinating and informative read and I loved the style of writing and how the author talks about historical characters making them fascinating and vivid.
It's an excellent read that I strongly recommend.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This is a study of the city of Ravenna during what used to be called the ‘dark ages’ (roughly 402AD to 802AD). The main point of the book is to explain show that this was not really a period in which the Roman Empire wound down, but a period in which the modern world was built - her concluding chapter argues that Ravenna was the first European city.

To demonstrate this point Herrin sets her frame of reference set at panoroma-level. It is a ‘European city’ because of the way it connected Goths, Franks, Romans, Byzantines, as well as its mediating position in the triangular relation between the Roman Popes, Roman Emperors in Constantinople, and The European powers (the Goths, Lombards and Franks - in that order). This is not a narrow history of a single city but a geopolitical survey.

Since it is these bigger power blocks that determined Ravenna’s particular fate we hear a lot about them and perhaps less about the Ravenna you might visit. There are details about the main monuments and Agnellus the Historian’s Book of Pontiffs keeps us abreast of who the bishops and Archbishops were (and several had a decisive influence) but these details are mixed in with the history of the Goths, the Lombards, the Byzantine emperors, the popes, Church Councils (theology plays an important role) and the rising Islamic empire.

As a result there is no single narrative thread - the book zigs-zags back and forth a bit to cope with all this. The scope can make this a bit of a challenge, but I liked the ambitious approach. The book covers the same (sort of) ground as John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium: the Early Centuries. Norwich achieved a clear narrative focus by sacrificing the richer historical context that Herrin fills in. Her accounts of key figures like Gallia Placidia, Theodoric, Emperor Leo III, and Charlemagne really benefit from the wide-angle perspective, explaining their role in making a Western Empire that was different from an Eastern one.

This book is part of a trend for seeing the ‘dark ages’ less as a tine of decline and fall but of multicultural exchange and hybridisation between cultures. Older historians knew about these exchanges but didn’t tend to see them as a positive thing, as Herrin does. Herrin does a good job in showing the value of being more positive.

A sequel of sorts, or maybe more a parallel, to Herrin's previous book on Byzantium. Which I recall more fondly than my review suggests I felt at the time, so bear in mind I may likewise soften on this one as memory smooths its edges. But it really doesn't get off to a good start with the attempt to rebrand 'late antiquity' as 'early Christendom', an effort to get us thinking in terms of a new beginning rather than a drawn-out ending, which to me of course feels defeatist as even the last faint sputtering of antiquity is much to be preferred – it's a bit like trying to rebrand 'old age' as 'young corpsehood'. Anyway, the focus of attention this time is the disappointing follow-up capital of the Western Roman Empire as it ebbs and flows over the years 390-813, and against the more thematic approach taken in Byzantium, here it's strictly chronological. At times it reads like a textbook, which is not in itself a complaint – I was that weird kid who wouldn't just read the assigned chapters of the history textbook but the whole thing, so I knew how it all connected. But it does feel a lot less lively and three-dimensional than one has come to expect after 20 years reading either contemporary history or slightly idiosyncratic older takes. There are only occasional attempts to evoke how it felt to live through the times; for the most part it's heavy on those old mainstays of kings, emperors, popes and bishops. Dear gods the bishops. They trudge through the pages, some worse than others but few of them sticking in the memory bar maybe Archbishop Damianus, Abbot John, and their shit miracles. Sometimes a name helps – Bishop Neon, who as it turns out did indeed decorate the Baptistery of the Orthodox with bright colours; Bishop Ursus, who sadly wasn't a bear in a mitre, but that was still absolutely how I pictured him. These pedestrian prelates playing such prominent parts because this was the period when Christianity, having gained official tolerance, almost immediately turned around and began showing the pagans how intolerance should be done. Starting on the pagans, obviously - there are quotes from some sermons by Peter Chrysologus in which they make an early start on the long-term policy of being even better than COVID at shutting down anything which makes life worth living. But then showing quite what amateurs of animosity the pagans had been by really going for it once they turn on each other. Arianism at least makes a certain sort of sense – and also, of course, ultimately, sneakily won (almost anyone picturing the two less nebulous persons of Jehovah nowadays, I'd contend, would have the father older than the son). Thereafter, though, it's a parade of pettifogging quibbles about the number and nature of divine essences, natures, wills, energies...the sort of stuff which feels like painful fanwank even when it's happening about a show you're really into, and which is simply obscene when people are getting killed over it. These aren't even heresies with a germ of sense like the Cathars, or an interesting intellectual hook like Calvin – they're just dull arguments about stuff which even the faithful would mostly now consider unworthy of attention, fractious obsessiveness for the sake of it, the sort of thing which makes one positively long for big, important questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Eventually, with the Three Chapters, even Herrin's patience is exhausted. "To modern sensibilities there is something incomprehensible in the way the Three Chapters continued to envenom ecclestiastical relations". No, really? There's a particular nastiness about some of the measures that come in as toleration for different creeds is reduced, like banning anyone but the orthodox (ie Catholic) from making wills - the sort of horrific not-quite-extirpation measure which recalls the expropriation of Jews in the 20th century (and, of course, the intervening centuries). In the conclusion, Herrin says "I have attempted to show that creation and innovation accompanied the conflicts and immiseration, that what had been the western Roman empire experienced the birth pangs of a new social order as much as the death throes of the old one". Which to me can't help but recall those Pollyannas suggesting that our vile new world of Zoom socialising and 'virtual gigs' is anything other than a horrible shadow of what went before. These little details serve instead to remind the reader that yes, sometimes things get worse for a very long time; Honorius, who moved the capital to Ravenna, was also the emperor who abandoned Britain, so to a British reader in particular can only seem like a manager of decline. Indeed, his reign is as good a point as any to say, that wasn't even a good time really, but it was better than things would be for the next millennium. A verdict I find it all too easy to imagine people will one day apply to 2019 too, although I realise I'm likely being unduly optimistic in assuming not only that there will still be humans that far in the future, but that they'll have the civilisation, records, inclination and liberty to study history.

Still, there are little bits of fun along the way, even if it's as basic as the Goths turning up and picturing them as the modern sort. For me it's even funnier when it's incursions by the Goths and the Alans, simply because in my teens there was a goth-adjacent kid called Alan. But the real star of the section headed "Living with the Goths", and a figure who comes across as a favourite of Herrin's, is not Andrew Eldritch but Galla Placidia, the Imperial daughter who married a Gothic king. And yes, there is something impressive about any woman who could end up as de facto ruler of the Roman Empire, even in this diminished form, though alas she seems to have made the classic regent's mistake of failing to prepare the next generation, not letting her son learn the reins of government even once he was nominally emperor, and being such an all-round nightmare that her daughter appealed to Attila the Hun - who, apart from everything else which might make him proverbially other than the ideal husband, already had a number of wives - to come rescue her from her own family. But, whatever her failings as a parent, Galla P does at least stick in the memory, which too few of her successors over the following centuries manage. As with Bishop Neon, some linger simply for their names, like Exarch Smaragdus, who sounds like a refugee from a D-list fantasy novel, or Bonus the bracarius, or trouser-maker – doesn't Bonus the Breeker sound like he should be in a Frankie Howerd film? There is an interesting story in here – the way the city pulls closer to and further from Byzantium, the contested legacy of Rome, the qualified assimilation of barbarians – but too often it's buried in an endless procession of thinly characterised arseholes murdering and mutilating each other for power they don't then do anything much with, beyond see a little more of it slip away as they try to amass their own heap. And frankly I've seen enough Tory leadership contests lately that I don't need more of that. There's lots of corruption among the civil and religious authorities, but all of it grubby financial stuff or doctrinal shenanigans, none of it the interestingly fruity Roman decadence of a Caligula, Heliogabalus, even the tackier bad emperors like Nero or Commodus. At times Herrin seems almost deliberately to be avoiding colourful detail - I think this may be the only book I've ever read where the Avars crop up without their penchant for anal impaling meriting a mention. And in general there's still that lack of a sense of what wider life in Ravenna was like, beyond the theological bickering and the wars of attrition. Occasionally we get a short chapter on someone like Agnellus the doctor, or the anonymous Cosmographer, but never ones which make a very compelling case for their significance. Most glaring, to the 2020 reader, is that there's more space devoted to the redecoration, after the clampdown on Arianism, of a single church, than to Justinian's plague, a pandemic which made COVID look like a summer sniffle but here gets a passing mention.

There's more modern resonance in the way in which barbarians took over Rome and kept a lot of the appearance of it going, even if the whole thing was clearly a sham – the way that the Goths, even while recognising that they were in fact barbarians (as with 'heretics', a word I used to think people only ever applied to other people) also tried to get endorsed as successors rather than invaders. Theoderic serving as a sort of overture prefiguring Charlemagne, who pulled the trick off a little more successfully at the end of the book. Livening it up quite considerably, too. Even having studied him there was a whole angle here I'd never considered, his relations with the East - his daughter Rotrud engaged to the Byzantine emperor, nixed by Carolingian inheritance worries; a later plan for him to marry Empress Irene, nixed by her overthrow. But with him also making surprisingly friendly overtures to the Caliphate, receiving the present of an elephant from Harun al-Rashid. Also, his sons Louis and Pippin were subordinate kings and leading campaigns together at ages 14 and 15! Can you imagine the #ladsontour state of that?
(Although while we might see the current crop of supposedly democratic supposed leaders as barbarians desecrating the thrones on which they squat, perhaps they're more like the vainglorious, bullying Emperor Phokas, celebrated with the tallest column in the Forum. It was reused; it was also the last, and he was soon ingloriously removed from office. If only one could be sure that his modern ilk would go the same way)

The conclusion talks about how many of the sources are lost, what a tattered thing the historical record is where Ravenna is concerned – and also pulled the thematic strands together in a way the rest of the book too seldom managed. But it also reinforced a nagging sense that this book was trying to be too many things at once. For large swathes it feels like Herrin more wanted to do a book specifically about church, state and schism as reflected in Ravenna, in which case fair enough, but that's not what the subtitle 'Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe' advertises. Equally, the conclusion suggests this is a story about the birth of the mediaeval city, but in that case it needed bringing to the fore more. Maybe there are two shorter books here, or something more like Byzantium, where a general spine is given but then used to hang essays on individual topics. Hell, sometimes whole sections aren't even about Ravenna so much as the Eastern empire's treatment of the West in general, the West's faltering attempts to find its own new directions. Which is where Herrin ends, mercifully sparing us the interminable squabbles of Charlemagne's successors. As the book closes, Ravenna has finally fallen victim to an excess of capitals: Constantinople has the power and the lineage, Rome is the original, Aachen the new heart of a new empire, and Ravenna is finally just another city again. One with a load of fancy architecture, granted, but even some of that has been nabbed to pimp Aachen. This book has certainly made me more interested to see Ravenna one day, if we ever get the world back, but for the general reader I'm not sure I could recommend it.

(Netgalley ARC)

Anyone like me who rather shamefully has a historical blank when it comes to that time between the decline of the classical period and the start of the medieval, would do well to pick up this book. Herrin offers up a detailed historical narrative that charts not just the role of Ravenna as imperial capital of the west, but also navigates us surely through the complications of Goth invasions, the decline of Rome, Constantinople/Byzantium, and the complicated rise of Christianity.

After a brief introduction, it opens with Galla Placidia in the late fourth century and her extraordinary story of kidnapping and marriage before she emerges as empress mother. Following the emperors in linear fashion, this closes with the age of Charlemagne in the eighth century.

Along the way, we meet bishops and archbishops, Goths and Ostrogoths, Arab conquests and Church councils, Justinian and Belisarius. There's perhaps too much on the in-fighting of church factions over issues of creed for my taste but there's no question that this needs to be here. I also thought there would be more on the architecture and art of Ravenna but sadly so many of the buildings have been lost along with documentary sources.

Considering the paucity of primary sources and the Christianised bias of those that exist, Herrin has done an exemplary job of making the story flow. This is aimed as a peer group of historians but is readable and accessible by non-experts wanting a reliable, detailed and properly-referenced history of this period.