Mysteries of the Middle Ages

Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill

Category: History Grade: B

This book is the 5th in Cahill's seven book "hinges of history" series. He is superb at historical analysis looking for the key events and people that had major impact on the world. His previous books have looked at the Jews, the Irish and the Greeks plus an excellent book on the "historical" Jesus. There are quite a few historians who don't think much of anything critical happened in the Middle Ages. Cahill isn't one of them. He makes a great case that the events of this period of history, roughly the 12th through 14th centuries, went a long way to defining the modern world. In fact, the book's subtitle is pretty emphatic -- The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe.

You get a great view of some personalities of this period that most people know little about, even though the names are familiar. Hildegaard, a twelfth century girl from the Rhineland, was given to the church as an eight year old. She went on to become one of the first women in history whose writings were taken seriously by the all-male clergy. Cahill credits Hildegaard, along with Eleanor of Aquitaine with starting what has become a major revolution in the role of women in society. Cahill continues to show us a series of major figures of the era who changed the nature of sexuality and romantic love, literature and art -- figures like Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Dante and others.

I only have a couple of knocks on this book that dropped its grade a little -- actually one knock in two forms. Cahill has tendency, once in a while, to throw in anachronistic references to modern times -- e.g. a comment about Iraq in the middle of a discussion of the Crusades. At first I appreciated his effort to try to make century-old history relevant but, eventually, it just got distracting. The second knock is the ultimate representative of this problem -- in fact, just skip the last chapter. After this really informative and often moving book, Cahill goes off on a half dozen page rant about the modern Catholic Church, most of it about the pedophilia scandals of the recent past. Its a vicious attack - maybe even a warranted one -- just way out of place as the summary piece of the book.