A period in European history marked by efforts to reform the Christian Church
The repeated expulsions of Jews from England, France and Flanders, the Hussites in Prague, the welcome and later hardening in Poland and Lithuania, the status of Jews in Germany, the Reformation's debt to Hebrew learning, and Luther's late attacks.
The religious, social and economic roots of medieval and Renaissance hostility toward the Jews, the first ghetto, the host accusations, moneylending and interest rates, nationalism, the church councils and popes who restricted Jewish life, and the massacres of the fourteenth century.
How Jews were blamed for the plague of 1348, the massacres and flights that followed, the German expulsions of the fifteenth century, John of Capistrano's campaign, the Regensburg affair, and the popes' attempts to restrain the Portuguese Inquisition.
Where the exiles of Spain and Portugal could go: the closing of Sicily, Sardinia and Naples, the first ghetto of Venice in 1516, the popes of Rome from tolerance to restriction, flight to Antwerp and Amsterdam, hardship in North Africa, and the welcome in Ottoman lands and Safed.
How the Jews endured: the humiliation of the badge, exclusion from most trades, the self-government of the community, the law codes of Jacob ben Asher, Joseph Karo and Moses Isserles, the burning of the Talmud, the Zohar, and the false messianic hopes of David Reubeni and Solomon Molcho.
Why the second dispersion produced little brilliant culture, and the Jewish scholars, mapmakers, astronomers and physicians who nevertheless served Renaissance Europe: Elijah Levita, the Abravanel family, Judah Leon's Dialogues of Love, Abraham Zacuto, the Cresques family and Amatus Lusitanus.
The last great Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages: Joseph Caspi, Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides) with his science and daring rationalism, Hasdai Crescas and his turn from reason to faith, Joseph Albo, and the long silence of Jewish thought until Spinoza.
The daily struggle of ordinary people behind the famous events of the sixteenth century: the peasant's hard life, new crops and fertilizer from the Americas, mining and Agricola, early machines and clocks, shipbuilding, and the slow pace of roads and posts.
Travel and inns as Erasmus saw them, new trade routes and banking, silver from the Americas and the price revolution, the decline of the guilds, the rise of capitalism, harsh labor laws, class conflict, and the Reformation's attitude to wealth.
Theft, violence and disorder in the age of Francis I, the severity of criminal law and public punishments, sumptuary and moral laws, the gap between law and enforcement, torture and delay in the courts, and the rise of lawyers and legal theory, including Thomas Starkey.
How sixteenth-century Europeans actually behaved, set against their religious claims: attitudes to sex and courtship, parental control over marriage, Luther's alarm at youthful independence, betrothal and divorce customs, and the changing place of women in the household and the salon.
How commercial fraud replaced religious fraud, why charity declined in northern Europe, the new city-run systems of poor relief devised by Lutheran towns and by Juan Luis Vives, the continuing ruthlessness of politics and war, and the reformers' own complaints about declining morals.
