Heretics and Heroes
How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World
The Hinges of History
- By: Thomas Cahill
- Narrated by: Thomas Cahill
- Length: 12 hours 48 minutes
Description
From the inimitable bestselling author Thomas Cahill, another popular history—this one focusing on how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. 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.
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The Hinges of History Series

How the Irish Saved Civilization
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: Donal Donnelly
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Abridged: No
The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift, and a book in the best tradition of popular history -- the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent... Read more »
Learn more
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea - Abridged
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: Olympia Dukakis
Length: 7 hours 7 minutes
Abridged: Yes
In the fourth volume of the acclaimed Hinges of History series, Thomas Cahill brings his characteristic wit and style to a fascinating tour of ancient Greece.
The Greeks invented everything from Western warfare to mystical prayer, from logic to statecraft. Many of their achievements, particularly in art and philosophy, are widely celebrated;... Read more »

Mysteries of the Middle Ages - Abridged
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: Thomas Cahill
Length: 6 hours 26 minutes
Abridged: Yes
After the long period of cultural decline known as the Dark Ages, Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, art, literature, philosophy, and science and began to develop a vision of Western society that remains at the heart of Western civilization today.
By placing the image of the Virgin Mary at the center of their churches and their ... Read more »

Sailing the Wine Dark Sea
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 7 hours 36 minutes
Abridged: No
In Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, his fourth volume to explore “the hinges of history,” Thomas Cahill escorts the reader on another entertaining—and historically unassailable—journey through the landmarks of art and bloodshed that defined Greek culture nearly three millennia ago.
In the city-states of Athens and Sparta and throughout the Greek... Read more »

Mysteries of the Middle Ages
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 10 hours 19 minutes
Abridged: No
After the long period of cultural decline known as the Dark Ages, Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, art, literature, philosophy, and science and began to develop a vision of Western society that remains at the heart of Western civilization today.
By placing the image of the Virgin Mary at the center of their churches and their ... Read more »

Heretics and Heroes
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: Thomas Cahill
Length: 12 hours 48 minutes
Abridged: No
From the inimitable bestselling author Thomas Cahill, another popular history—this one focusing on how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. 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... Read more »

Desire of the Everlasting Hills
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: Brian F. O'Byrne
Length: 9 hours 15 minutes
Abridged: No
From the bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews, his most compelling historical narrative yet.
How did an obscure rabbi from a backwater of the Roman Empire come to be the central figure in Western Civilization? Did his influence in fact change the world? These are the questions Thomas Cahill addresses in... Read more »

How the Irish Saved Civilization - Abridged
By: Thomas Cahill
Narrated by: Liam Neeson
Length: 3 hours 1 minute
Abridged: Yes
The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift, and a book in the best tradition of popular history -- the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent... Read more »
Learn more