From the Book - First American edition.
Prologue. The collapse of learning
The saving of the texts, 500-750
Charlemagne restores the discipline of learning
Conformity and diversity in the Christian communities of the late first millennium
Authority and dissent in the medieval church, 1000-1250
Abelard and the battle for reason
The cry of libertas, the rebirth of the city-state
Success and failure within the medieval university
Medieval philosophy : a reopening or a dead end?
The glimmerings of a scientific revival, 1200-1350
Dante, Marsilius and Boccaccio and their worlds
Humanism and the challenge to the scholastics
The exuberance of Florentine humanism
The flowering of the Florentine Renaissance
Plato re-enters the western mind
The printing press : what was published and why?
The loss of papal authority and the rise of the laity, 1300-1550
Defining global space: the mapping of the new world
How Europe learned to see again : Leonardo and Vasalius
Exploring the natural world in the sixteenth century
Imagining princely politics, from Utopia to the Machiavellian ruler
Broadening horizons : from the Laocoon to the academies
Encountering the peoples of the 'Newe founde worldes', 1492-1610
The reformation : new perspectives for the Western mind?
The world of Catholic renewal
Montaigne and Hamlet : peace or turmoil in the solitary soul?
Absolutist France versus the Dutch Republic : a study of political contrasts
Britain's revolutionary century
Envisaging an ideal society in the seventeenth century
From natural philosophy into science. The astronomers
Was there an English scientific revolution?
Did the seventeenth century see the making of the modern mind?
Was there really 'a reopening of the western mind?.
