Beacon Lights of History, Vol 5: The Middle Ages

A 19th-century historian's sweeping meditation on the era that defined Western civilization. John Lord, writing with Victorian confidence, turns his gaze toward the Middle Ages, a thousand years of monasteries and castles, crusades and cathedrals, saints and scheming kings. This volume profiles the dominant religious figures who shaped medieval spirituality while examining the great movements that convulsed Europe: the Crusades that carried Christian armies to holy war, and the feudal system that bound lord to vassal in chains of obligation and protection. Lord writes history as character study and moral portrait, finding in these centuries the origins of modern institutions, modern conflicts, and modern faith. His prose carries the assured tone of an age that believed it understood history's arc. For readers who wish to see how an earlier generation made sense of the medieval world, and what they got right and wrong.