Book review: Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages - The Washington Post

Michael Dirda from The Washington Post reviews historian Mark Gregory Pegg’s book ‘Beatrice’s Last Smile’.

In “Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages,” he [Mark Pegg] tracks these “fluctuations between the divine and the human by interweaving stories about men, women, and children living and dying between the third and the fifteenth centuries.” It’s quite a tapestry.

The book opens with the martyrdom of a 22-year-old Christian woman in 203 and ends in 1431 with the burning of Joan of Arc as a heretic. In between these two horrific events, Pegg — a professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis — relies on short biographies and dramatic anecdotes to illuminate, if only in strobe-light flashes, what many people still regard as the “Dark Ages,” a millennium of ignorance, confusion and all-encompassing religiosity.

See full review here @ The Washington Post