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T H E M I D D L E A G E S 10 history texts, especially those for children, perpetuate all of these atti- tudes at once. Susan Wise Bauer, in her 2007 textbook The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, compares the unity and stability of the Roman Empire with the disunity, ignorance, and desperation of the Middle Ages: “[Medieval people] lived in separate villages, speaking their different languages. And they no longer read the old books, written in Latin and Greek. They spent their days trying to grow enough food to stay alive and worrying about the next barbarian attack. . . . We call the cen- turies after Rome was destroyed the Middle Ages” (Bauer 2007, 318–19). In another passage Bauer pushes these stereotypes further by cloaking the entire Middle Ages with the darkness of ignorance about history, medi- cine, or even basic literacy. This darkness, she claims, was lifted only with the Renaissance invention of the printing press. Bauer is not alone in teaching twenty-first-century children about a “Dark Ages” that is even more backward than Gibbon or Burckhardt ever would have claimed. In 2012, the online study site ReadWorks painted a brutal picture of the Middle Ages as nothing more than a period of post-Roman ignorance and laziness, religious mind control, and sheer physical exhaustion. The brief article concludes, “People were not as curi- ous about the world around them. This is why the Middle Ages is some- times called the Dark Age. During the Renaissance all of this changed. If the Middle Ages were dark, the Renaissance was the bright dawn of a new era” (ReadWorks 2012). Statements like this are problematic not simply because they oversimplify the millennium of medieval history, but also because they are based more on popular stereotypes than on actual historical evidence. PRIMARY DOCUMENTS JORDANES, HISTORY OF THE GOTHS (551 CE): THE DEVASTATION OF BARBARIAN ATTACKS Jordanes was a bureaucrat and historian in the Eastern Roman (or “Byzan- tine”) Empire in the sixth century. He was descended from Gothic settlers and proudly gave his people a formal, written history in his Getica, or History of the Goths, in 551. He gives the Goths a lengthy, mostly fictional, past to show that they also have a long and worthy history like the Greeks and Romans. Jordanes focused especially on the military endeavors of the Goths and other “barbarian” groups like the Huns. This passage from the Getica shows how