Reviewers agreed that it was more than a mere condensing of its parent, being almost completely new material from the pen of Previté-Orton that reflected the latest developments in medieval history in the 1940s rather than the views of twenty or thirty years earlier that formed the original work.

There was disquiet, however, that even such a distinguished author as Previté-Orton could not be right all the time and that the inevitable generalising statements essential in such a condensed work might be mistaken for settled facts when much about medieval history remained uncertain.

In 1939, the Syndics of Cambridge University Press asked Previté-Orton to write a concise version of the earlier history which was a work of reference that in practice was too detailed and too long to be read in full.

As an overall narrative, however, in which current historical debates were not addressed and without footnotes, Rothwell worried that the general reader might underestimate the extent to which the conclusions were still tentative and how many questions remained unanswered in medieval history.

In contrast to Rothwell, Setton found the coverage of Byzantine history inadequate, but he also acknowledged the ambition and scope of the work and concluded by saying that it was yet another book that he wished he had written.

[8] The illustrations were exceptionally well chosen by S. H. Steinberg but the maps were less successful with bold divisions that did not well reflect the reality of the porous nature of national borders in the medieval period.

[9] Philip C. Sturges, in The Western Political Quarterly, felt that the claim that the book could appeal to the general reader was false as it was "too encyclopedic, too arid, too packed to admit of any sustained appreciation by the public.