This magisterial book is an analysis of the course of Western intellectual history between A.D. 400 and 1400. The book is arranged in two parts: the first surveys the comparative modes of thought and varying success of Byzantine, Latin-Christian, and Muslim cultures, and the second takes the reader from the eleventh-century revival of learning to the high Middle Ages and beyond, the period in which the vibrancy of Western intellectual culture enabled it to stamp its imprint well beyond the frontiers of Christendom. Marcia Colish argues that the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition were laid in the Middle Ages and not, as is commonly held, in the Judeo-Christian or classical periods. She contends that Western medieval thinkers produced a set of tolerances, tastes, concerns, and sensibilities that made the Middle Ages unlike other chapters of the Western intellectual experience. She provides astute descriptions of the vernacular and oral culture of each country of Europe; explores the nature of medieval culture and its transmission; profiles seminal thinkers (Augustine, Anselm, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Ockham); studies heresy from Manichaeism to Huss and Wycliffe; and investigates the influence of Arab and Jewish writing on scholasticism and the resurrection of Greek studies. Colish concludes with an assessment of the modes of medieval thought that ended with the period and those that remained as bases for later ages of European intellectual history.

A connected account of European thought from the Patristic age through the mid-fourteenth century, and emphasizing educational systems, the interaction between the popular and elite cultures, and medieval humanism; with excellent interpretive chapters on science and philosophy.

This work presents a connected account of western European thought from the Patristic age to the mid-fourteenth century. Dales aims to keep his reader close to the sense of the texts, which he translates, frequently at some length, or summarizes in his exposition. He attempts to include important matters which are generally omitted in broad treatments — the chapter on the tenth century is the longest in the book — but the author's choice of topics is fully justified by his special intimacy with what he elects to discuss, particularly the hexameral tradition (ancient and medieval), the scientific tradition, twelfth-century treatises on nature and cosmology, discussions of the eternity of the world, and the thought of Robert Grosseteste. This adds a personal and distinctive character to the word. Dales stresses throughout the diversity and vigor of medieval thought, qualities which he illustrates widely from Latin and vernacular poetry and literature of various kinds as well as from philosophical and theological texts.