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Of course, if you bothered to read the posted article, the author takes the "decline of Rome" perspective and rejects medievalists' "change and continuity" perspective.

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Why do you say that's a "medievalist" perspective? The "change and continuity" perspective is endemic to an array of interpretive schools.

If you had read the article, you would have learned that Devereaux contends that the "change and continuity" is promulgated primarily by historians studying the Medieval period, and not those studying Classical Antiquity.

It isn't promulgated primarily by historians studying the Middle Ages. It's promulgated primarily by classicists, and in truth held by the majority of academic historians, and I'm willing to believe widely by medievalists.

The author shouldn't have made such a pat assignation of blame. But, erm, I was supposed to subsume his (in my view flawed) sorting argument into my thinking, and not having done so shows I didn't read the piece? How odd.

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