The Story of the Middle Ages — The Folio Society | Southern, Huizinga, Moss, Barraclough & Mundy | 1999 | Five Volume Set in Slipcase | Very Good

The Middle Ages did not happen all at once, and this set has the good sense not to pretend otherwise.

Rather than hand a thousand years to a single author, the Folio Society commissioned five, each a specialist in his own stretch of it. H. St. L. B. Moss opens with the collapse of Rome and the long uncertain dawn that followed. Geoffrey Barraclough, R. W. Southern and John H. Mundy carry the story through the centuries of consolidation and flowering. Johan Huizinga closes with the strange, gorgeous, exhausted world of the fifteenth century. Read end to end, the shifts in voice are part of the pleasure — five historians who do not entirely agree with one another, which is rather the point.

Two of these are not merely good books but permanent ones. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, first published in 1953, remains on undergraduate reading lists seventy years on — a study of how medieval Europe came to think the way it did, written with a clarity that has never dated. Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages, published in Dutch in 1919, is one of the founding works of cultural history: an account of the late medieval mind so vivid that historians still quarrel with it rather than ignore it.

The production is the Folio Society doing what it does best. Five volumes in alternating red and green illustrated boards, each blocked in gilt with a flowing vine and foliage design, and each spine carrying a purple panel with its own gilt figure — a warrior, travellers with a camel, a seated scholar, a crowned king, and for Huizinga, Death himself with his scythe. The green slipcase repeats the vine motif in gilt beneath a purple band. Colour plates and black-and-white maps throughout, and around 1,600 pages in total.

Condition — Very Good. The books themselves are close to Fine and have clearly been shelved rather than read. Boards bright in both colours, gilt crisp and unrubbed, purple panels still strong. Most notably there is no fading to the spines at all, which is the first thing to go on this set and the thing worth looking for when comparing copies. Fore-edges clean. There is a small dark spot to the top edge of one volume and light dust-greying to another. The slipcase shows the honest wear of its years — light rubbing and bumping to the edges, with a small mark and a loose thread at the base — but is sound and square.

This is the 1999 third printing, the set having first appeared in 1998. It is not a scarce thing, and we would not pretend otherwise — but well-kept copies with unfaded spines are a good deal less common than the listing counts suggest. A considerable amount of book, and it will look as well on the shelf as it reads in the hand.

Extra photographs available on request. Just get in touch and we will be happy to help.

Wrapped in good heavy paper — we don't skimp on that — and packed into a sturdy box so nothing shifts on the way to you, wherever in the world that happens to be. Kat packs and checks every parcel herself, and she is not easily pleased. The unwrapping ought to be half the pleasure.