Description
The Renaissance: God in Man
Volume 8: A.D. 1300 to 1500
But amid its splendors, night falls on medieval Christianity
The late Middle Ages brought great suffering and death: the shattering of western Christendom between rival papacies, ecclesiastical corruption and cynicism, a plague called the Black Death which killed off half the population of Europe, the destruction of France by England, the fall of Constantinople to a resurgent Islam, and the merciless Catholic suppression of nascent Protestantism. Yet despite such ruin and despair, good things emerged. “Holy Russia” arose in the north and threw off Tartar oppression. Spaniard Christians freed themselves at last from Islam and discovered new continents across the Atlantic. In Italy, the Renaissance saw a magnificent rebirth of art and science in a new and fascinating form.
(Click on the image below to view a reduced resolution sample chapter drawn from the book so you get a sense of its writing style.)
Chapter One
Dante writes an epic poem of redemption that inspires the ages
- Quotations from the Divine Comedy
- The troubling concept of purgatory
Chapter Two
The Black Death, history’s worst plague ravages Christendom
Chapter Three
To Babylon and back: the church is rocked by avarice, jealousy and schism
- The mystic Catherine of Siena drives the pope back to Rome
- John Wyclif leads an attack on the church that foreshadows things to come
Chapter Four
The Czech hero John Hus perishes in flames for instituting reform
Chapter Five
The English nearly kill a nation until Joan of Arc turns the tide
- The many depictions of the Maid of Orleans
Chapter Six
Constantinople falls after 700 years as Islam erupts anew
- The town of Otranto fails the Pasha’s push
- The Hungarian Jan Hunyadi scatters the Muslims at Belgrade
Chapter Seven
‘Holy Russia’ ousts the Tartars and rejects western Christendom
- The monk Sergius lays the foundations at the freed nation
- Tamerlane, scourge of God, brings new horror from the East
- The marital union of Poland and Lithuania creates a Baltic power
Chapter Eight
Isabella and Ferdinand unite Spain and restore it to Christendom
- To unite the faith, Ferdinand unleashes the horror of the Spanish Inquisition
Chapter Nine
Ambition versus faith: the conflicted Columbus discovers America
- Henry the Navigator’s great ‘end run’ around Islam
Chapter Ten
The Italian Renaissance magnificently concludes the Middle Ages
- Leonardo da Vinci: a man of inspired distraction
Chapter Eleven
The Borgias and the Renaissance papacy nearly wreck Christendom
- Lucrezia, femme fatale of Renaissance Italy
- The Dominican monk whom the pope could not allow to live
- Nicolo Machiavelli pens a bible of slease politics for the ages
- Amid medieval ruin, Groote and Kempis bring a glimmer of light
