How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World
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Published Oct 2013
368 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
From the inimitable and bestselling author Thomas Cahill, another popular history, focusing on the Renaissance and Reformation and how this innovative period changed the Western world.
In Volume VI of his acclaimed Hinges of History series, Thomas Cahill guides us through the thrilling period of Renaissance and Reformation (late fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries), so full of innovation and cultural change that the Western world would not experience its like again until the twentieth century. Beginning with the continent-wide disaster of the Black Plague, Cahill traces the many innovations in European thought and experience that served both the new humanism of the Renaissance and the seemingly abrupt religious alterations of the increasingly radical Reformation.
This is an age of the most sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies, and of newly found courage, as many thousands refuse to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. It is an era of newly discovered continents and previously unknown peoples. More than anything, it is a time of individuality in which a whole culture must achieve a new balance, if the West is to continue.
"Starred Review. [The] remarkable fourth installment of his Hinges of History series, Cahill writes passionately...an entertaining yet thought-provoking examination of Western civilization." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. The breadth of Cahill's knowledge and his jocular style of writing make for a remarkable book." - Kirkus
"The writing is crisp, conversational, and matched by very few non-fiction writers out there today." - James S. Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, and author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thomas Cahill was the author of the bestselling Hinges of History series (a planned seven part series) including How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1996), The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (1999), Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (2001),
Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why The Greeks Matter (2004),
Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (2006), and A Saint on Death Row (2009).
A lifelong scholar, Thomas Cahill studied with some of America's most distinguished literary and biblical scholars.
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