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Title: Great disappointment
Review: I was very disappointed by the book. More properly, it should have been named "The history of the Roman Catholic Church", since three quarters of the book are devoted to christian theology and church institutions. Very little attention is paid to agriculture, technology, mililary organization, diplomacy, etc. Moreover, the books never strays outside the Western Europe. The Balkans, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe are hardly ever mentioned, and the Moslem and Jewish cultures are treated only as external influences on the "civilized world", not as parts of it. Throughout the book, "civilization" is implicitly equated with christianity, - and only one of its varieties, at that. I ended up learning far too much about obscure doctrinal disputes, but nothing about the real world that paved the way for our own.
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