Alice Rio for the Dark Ages

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.

She joins us for The Dark Ages: A New History for Our Times, a sweeping history of Europe between 500 and 1000 AD.The Dark Ages have long been cast as a murky, unknowable period - a void between the worlds of Rome and later medieval Europe.

That picture is wrong.Told through the lives of twelve women who moved between different cultures, The Dark Ages reveals a world in motion: shaped by exchange across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and alive with competing ideas about religion, power and gender.Here is Balthild, an English girl enslaved in seventh-century Francia who rises to become queen and fights to free other enslaved women.

In ninth-century Byzantium, Theodora becomes empress by winning a beauty pageant, and restores the worship of icons after decades of bloody conflict.

And in tenth-century Muslim Spain, Subh - enslaved from the Christian Basque country into the Cordoban harem - rises through talent and intellect to become the caliph's closest partner.These women moved mostly alone, coerced, and without armies.

To survive, they had to adapt quickly to chaotic environments and dangerous people.

Discovering Europe through their eyes - as they pieced lives together and tested the limits of their new homes - offers a fundamentally new perspective on the era.Drawing on rich written sources and material culture, The Dark Ages overturns the idea of a period defined by obscurity.

Instead, it reveals a complex, baroque, unfamiliar world whose richness is there in the records, if we know how to look for it.