Apparently it's "books about the Middle Ages riffing on darkness" o clock this year. Having read The Light Ages about science in the Middle Ages, I'm now onto The Bright Ages.
Which is complicated, because while I am not a medievalist, I was Victorianist for a while and that means that 1) I am very familiar with the misuses of history at the hands of the 19th century and 2) all my friends were medievalists and renaissance scholars. So I followed the controversy around this book and read the critiques and, I mean, they're right. This book has a problem imagining an audience that is not white or christian. I am, in my own way, very familiar with the Middle Ages as the era of the Rishonim and that means that the inclusive project of the book—other people were here *with* us—is fundamentally uninteresting. The stories individually were interesting, but it doesn't live up to the sum of its parts.
On the bright side, M. Rambaran-Olm's review does have some great recommendations for what to read next. So on to Oliviette Otele's African Europeans once this current crop of "everything you've put on hold just came in right now" clears.