Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History, 6)

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. 

eginning 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.