Medieval Essays is the mature reflection of one of the most gifted cultural historians of the twentieth century.

Christopher Dawson wrote The Judgment of the Nations in 1942, in the midst of the horrors of World War II.

Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas.

In scope and in vision Christopher Dawson’s historiography ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. Several major themes run through Dawson’s work, but perhaps his most unique contribution was his insistence on the importance of religion in shaping and sustaining civilizations. Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society’s historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West. Dawson maintained that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.

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Originally published: New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965.