Is Stephen Greenblatt a victim of his own method?

There has been a piling on effect in criticism of Stephen Greenblatt's 2011 love letter to the European Renaissance.  There is much head-scratching and outrage in this LA Review of Books: Swerve article and the blogasphere (In the Middle) about the awards that have been heaped upon a book full of historical inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and barely disguised anti-religious rhetoric--an argument based on antithesis, a sermon on the evils of medieval culture that will soothe its reader with a sense of historical certitude.

Therefore, I commit myself to piling on.  But I also want to raise a question that may not have been mentioned yet.  To put it blandly (and I'm not sure New Historicism deserves a subtler spin), if the works of individuals or intentional communities do not contribute to the construction of the archive, and the contours of culture are formed on the surface of insidious, unrecognized micrologies of power only, is it possible too that historical narratives can emerge from a Foucauldian morass without the benefit of intentional, self-aware scholarship? As a tenured professor at Harvard, Greenblatt has been afforded oodles of time to catch up on fifty years of medieval scholarship that has sunk the boat of the dark "Dark Ages."  How did he miss the sinking boat?  Maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that as a diagnosed (but untreated) New Historicist, Greenblatt should not bother to consider counter-narratives, since, in the end, the currents of history and history-telling will inevitably push us where they will, despite our own best efforts.