Exploring Eras and Pivotal Events
A retelling of Durant's account of French literature in an age of chaos: Philippe de Commynes, the first philosophical historian; the popular stage with its mysteries, farces and sotties; and the thief-poet François Villon, whose wit and laments outlived his crimes.
A retelling of Durant's account of fifteenth-century English kingship: rebellion under Henry IV, the glory of Henry V, the madness of Henry VI, thirty-one years of civil war, and the calculating rule of Henry VII, who left England orderly and solvent.
A retelling of Durant's account of England's economic rise: the decline of serfdom, the sheep that displaced farmers, the first merchant companies, the voyages of John Cabot, Henry VII's labor rules, and Jack Cade's rising of 1450.
A retelling of Durant's portrait of English daily life around 1500: blunt speech and arranged marriages, lawlessness and corruption, manor houses and meals, clothing, games, hazardous travel, harsh punishment, and Sir John Fortescue's defense of English law.
A retelling of Durant's account of English dissent in the fifteenth century: the Church's recovery after Wycliffe, the Lollards' demands, the law for burning heretics, Sir John Oldcastle's revolt, the quiet persistence of the movement, and Bishop Reginald Pecock's appeal to reason.
A retelling of Durant's survey of English art in the late Middle Ages: the Decorated and Perpendicular styles, timber roofs and fan vaults, Westminster, Windsor, Oxford, Eton and King's College Chapel, and the more modest achievements of English sculpture, woodcarving and illumination.
A retelling of Durant's account of English letters before the Tudors: the morality play Everyman, William Caxton's first printing press at Westminster, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and the tender voices in the Paston family letters.
A retelling of Durant's account of how Italian learning reached England: scholars who studied in Florence and Padua, the Oxford movement for Greek, Thomas Linacre's medicine, and John Colet's call for a purified, Bible-centered Church.
A retelling of Durant's opening of the Burgundy chapter: the four Valois dukes who built a rich, independent state, the splendor and license of their courts, and the contrasting mystics of the Netherlands, Gerard Groote's Brethren of the Common Life, and the book Imitation of Christ.
A retelling of Durant's account of the Burgundian Low Countries at their height: ducal patronage of letters, the great civic Gothic buildings, Claus Sluter's sculpture at Champmol, the rise of oil painting, the Van Eycks' Adoration of the Lamb, and Rogier van der Weyden.
A retelling of Durant's account of the last Valois duke of Burgundy: his ambition to unite his scattered lands into a kingdom between France and Germany, the sack of Dinant and Liège, the war against Louis XI and the Swiss, and his death at Nancy in 1477.
A retelling of Durant's closing section on Burgundy: the economic shift from Bruges to Antwerp, the second generation of Flemish painters from Dirk Bouts to Jan Gossart, the strange world of Hieronymus Bosch, and how Mary of Burgundy's marriage brought the Netherlands into the Habsburg empire.
