Medieval Great Courses

There’s the Renaissance we all know about: the cultural flourishing that produced iconic works of art, sculpture, and architecture. But underneath all the paint and marble is another side of the Renaissance with which we’re much less familiar.

All human beings, by nature, desire to know." —Aristotle, The Metaphysics. For well over 2,000 years, much of our fundamental "desire to know" has focused on the area we now call science. In fact, our commitment to science and technology has been so profound that these now stand as probably the most powerful of all influences on human culture.

The world has been fundamentally changed by the shock and devastation of a 21st-century pandemic. COVID-19 has claimed six million lives; we process a daily deluge of often conflicting and/or overwhelming information; and humanity has no way of knowing when this collective trauma will finally, truly end. Will our lives ever be the same again? It seems not

The medieval era was a watershed in Western history. This was a time of extraordinary advances in numerous fields of knowledge ranging from philosophy and theology to science, medicine, literature, and economics—as well as of revolutionary developments in education and the birth of the university. In its effects, this fascinating epoch was not only a time of great innovation, it was the era in which the seeds of the modern West were sown.