Alice Rio

Oxford historian Alice Rio argues that our vision of the Dark Ages as a murky void between the worlds of Rome and Medieval Europe is wrong. 

Instead, in the first history of the period to foreground female experience, she tells the story of Europe between 500 and 1000 AD through the lives of 12 women. They include Balthild, an English girl enslaved in seventh-century Francia who rises to become queen and fights to free other enslaved women. Theodora, who becomes empress by winning a beauty pageant, and restores the worship of icons after decades of bloody conflict in 12th Century Byzantium. And Subh – a Basque Christian enslaved into the Cordoban harem – who rises through talent and intellect to become the caliph’s closest partner.

Through their stories, Rio demonstrates that the Dark Ages were a period of exchange and cosmopolitanism, alive with competing ideas about religion, power and gender. Drawing on rich written sources and material culture, Rio’s new history of the Dark Ages overturns the idea of a period defined by obscurity.

Alice Rio is Chichele Professor of Medieval History at All Souls College, Oxford, having previously held the role of Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. She is one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of Dark Age Europe, and has published books and articles on law, slavery, women, heroic poetry and miracle stories.