Heretics and Heroes
Subtitle: how Renaissance artists and Reformation priests created our world
Publisher: Nan A. Talese, Doubleday
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 341
ISBN-13: 9780385495578
Description: 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.

From the inimitable bestselling author Thomas Cahill comes another popular history -- this one focusing on how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. It is a truly revolutionary book. In Volume VI of his acclaimed Hinges of History series, Thomas Cahill guides us through the thrilling period of the Renaissance and the Reformation (the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth century), 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 Death, Cahill traces the many developments 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 just-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. - Publisher.
Table of contents: title: Prelude : Philosophical tennis through the ages; title: Dress rehearsals for permanent change; title: New worlds for old : innovation on sea and land; title: The invention of human beauty : and the end of medieval piety; title: New thoughts for new worlds : deviant monks; title: Reformation! : Luther steps forward; title: Intermission : Il buono, Il brutto, Il cattivo (The good, the bad, and the ugly) : a portfolio of egos; title: Protestant picture : and other Northern images; title: Christian vs. Christian : the turns of the screw; title: Human love : how to live on this earth; title: Postlude : Hope and regret