Mysteries of the Middle Ages

The fifth volume of Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History series, arguing that the medieval centuries usually written off as a gap between Rome and the Renaissance were themselves the period in which European scholarship, art and natural philosophy were rebuilt. Cahill works city by city — Alexandria, Chartres, Bologna, Florence — and treats the cathedral schools, the first universities and the cults of the saints as the institutional soil the modern world grew out of rather than the thing it had to escape.

It is popular narrative history rather than academic medieval studies, and Cahill writes with an explicit thesis about cultural inheritance; readers should take the argument as a case being made, not a survey.

Context: One of three Cahill volumes in the adult band of this list, alongside Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea and The Gifts of the Jews — the curator is using the Hinges of History series as a spine for Western civilization, which is what makes it a curriculum book rather than a single recommendation.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Thomas Cahill — the author; three of his volumes appear in the adult band.
• Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea and The Gifts of the Jews — the companion volumes on this list.
• Christianity — the institutional carrier of the learning the book is tracking.
• Renaissance — what the book argues was continuous with the medieval period rather than a break from it.
• Progress — the underlying question: whether civilizational advance is cumulative or episodic.