An essential, epic new history illuminating the Middle Ages, told through the lives of twelve remarkable women who lived through the wild, raucous, and experimental time period and made it their own The era between the fall of Rome in AD 500 and the year 1000 feels strangely alien. We trace our ideas of democracy to ancient Greek philosophers and our artistic sensibilities to the Renaissance, but it can seem like there's little that we've inherited from the period in between, often called the Dark Ages. Is it truly such a lost time, irrelevant to our history and our understanding of ourselves? In The Dark Ages, historian Alice Rio creates an antidote to this narrative: Follow the women. The Middle Ages were marked by immense cultural diversity, shifting political landscapes, and religious struggles to win converts as well as achieve coexistence. When we observe such upheaval from the perspective of women, these times stop conforming to our own clichéd expectations, and human motivations become less impenetrable and more familiar. Like most of us, the women in this book were not the most powerful figures of their time, and history mostly hasn't made heroes of them. By walking in these women's shoes--including princesses, queens, nuns, and Viking captives--Rio celebrates the ability of people to survive, thrive, and discover their agency in an ever-changing world that often seems stacked against them. With rigorous research and lively storytelling, Rio illuminates the period we've struggled to see clearly, reminding readers that for the people living through this seemingly unknowable time, there was nothing especially dark about their experiences, and nothing crude or simplistic about the world they had to navigate. Focusing on ordinary people placed under extraordinary pressures, this enlightening book reveals that we have more in common with our Dark Age ancestors than we ever could have imagined.