{"id":717,"date":"2015-09-14T07:10:21","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T13:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/watchinggod\/?p=717"},"modified":"2015-09-14T07:10:21","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T13:10:21","slug":"the-dark-ages-told-in-bright-blocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/watchinggod\/2015\/09\/the-dark-ages-told-in-bright-blocks\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dark Ages, Told in Bright Blocks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"cover\"<\/a>I\u2019ve never been a big fan of the term \u201cDark Ages,\u201d actually. It seems kinda unfair to call the whole millennia between the disintegration of the Roman Empire to the start of the Renaissance \u201cdark\u201d\u2014particularly when it was such a cool time.<\/p>\n

Well, OK. \u201cCool\u201d maybe isn\u2019t quite the right word. The Black Death was kind of a downer, not to mention all the wars and famines and poverty and so on. But c\u2019mon. Castles! Cathedrals! Knights! Monks! It was a great time to, if not to live, then at least to imagine. As a kid, I spent hours in my own miniature medieval world, populated by pipe-cleaner knights carrying crayon-colored shields and riding to attack LEGO castles.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of the reasons why I enjoyed the book Medieval LEGO<\/em>, compiled by Greyson Beights, so much.<\/p>\n

Medieval LEGO<\/em>, published by No Starch Press, is part history book, part blocky romp into an imaginative past. Clearly Beights\u2014who\u2019s called in the book an \u201caward-winning LEGO builder\u201d and one of the organizers of BrickUniverse LEGO conventions\u2014has more of a LEGO budget to work with than I did as an 8-year-old. He got help from a bevy of fellow builders, who make about four centuries of European history (from 1028 to 1485) come alive in a colorful, bricky way.<\/p>\n

But while you buy a book like this for the LEGO illustrations, what really stood out to me was the history it told. Seventeen scholars contributed to the book, and there were people, battles and anecdotes I\u2019d never heard of. And while Medieval LEGO probably won\u2019t help a college student pass his European history final, there\u2019s a lot of information that\u2019ll be of interest to more than just kids.<\/p>\n

\"acre\"<\/a>The book was also a reminder of what a religious time the Middle Ages were. There\u2019s a section about the Siege of Acre, one of the bloodiest conflicts during the Crusades. We read about the monk Matthew Paris, one of the most educated men of his day and a relentless critic of King John, the guy who signed the Magna Carta. (As Dr. Anne Lawrence-Mathers writes, \u201cHe even added a poem that claimed that King John had gone to Hell, and when he arrived, he ha made Hell worse<\/em>.\u201d) There\u2019s a chapter on Margery Kempe, a devout (albeit annoying) Christian mystic. Faith inflected every aspect of Medieval life, and that influence comes across even in a book as whimsical as this.<\/p>\n

Medieval LEGO<\/em> doesn\u2019t ignore how difficult the Middle Ages were. But it clearly shows that these days weren\u2019t as dark as they\u2019re sometimes portrayed. The book officially releases Sept. 30.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve never been a big fan of the term \u201cDark Ages,\u201d actually. It seems kinda unfair to call the whole millennia between the disintegration of the Roman Empire to the start of the Renaissance \u201cdark\u201d\u2014particularly when it was such a cool time. Well, OK. \u201cCool\u201d maybe isn\u2019t quite the right word. The Black Death was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2036,"featured_media":718,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[23,258,259],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-history","tag-lego","tag-middle-ages"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Dark Ages, Told in Bright Blocks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I\u2019ve never been a big fan of the term \u201cDark Ages,\u201d actually. 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