The Dark Ages, Told in Bright Blocks

I’ve never been a big fan of the term “Dark Ages,” actually. It seems kinda unfair to call the whole millennia between the disintegration of the Roman Empire to the start of the Renaissance “dark”—particularly when it was such a cool time.

Well, OK. “Cool” maybe isn’t 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’mon. 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.

It’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed the book Medieval LEGO, compiled by Greyson Beights, so much.

Medieval LEGO, published by No Starch Press, is part history book, part blocky romp into an imaginative past. Clearly Beights—who’s called in the book an “award-winning LEGO builder” and one of the organizers of BrickUniverse LEGO conventions—has 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.

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’d never heard of. And while Medieval LEGO probably won’t help a college student pass his European history final, there’s a lot of information that’ll be of interest to more than just kids.

The book was also a reminder of what a religious time the Middle Ages were. There’s 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, “He even added a poem that claimed that King John had gone to Hell, and when he arrived, he ha made Hell worse.”) There’s 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.

Medieval LEGO doesn’t ignore how difficult the Middle Ages were. But it clearly shows that these days weren’t as dark as they’re sometimes portrayed. The book officially releases Sept. 30.