mysteries of the middle ages by thomas cahill

'Yes, they want to learn things, but they also don't want to be bored to death while they learn those things.' 'What academic writers forget is that everyone on Earth buys books for diversion, or entertainment,' he says. His subject matter can be as demanding as any found in a college text, but he is also the kind of writer who likens one private correspondence from the Middle Ages as a 'letter as full of catty innuendo as the dialogue from an episode of `Desperate Housewives'.' Mysteries of the Middle Ages is the fifth of seven planned books in Cahill's 'Hinges of Histories.' The series does not dwell on tragedy or mourn a lost golden age Cahill's 'Hinges' are the contributions different historical periods have made, what he has called 'a narration of how we became the people that we are.' In these books - published in Europe and around the world, too - Cahill seeks to lead modern readers inside the minds of those who lived and thought in ways unimaginable now. The typical best-selling historian writes of Great Men or epic battles, but the 66-year-old Cahill has become a million seller by telling more thought-provoking stories - the Irish preservation of ancient texts, how the Jews changed our sense of destiny, the egalitarianism of early Christianity, and now, the achievements of the Middle Ages. He is smiling, relaxed and informal even when discussing the most serious topics during a recent interview. 'But the advances we associate with the Renaissance -_ in the arts, sciences, education, scholarship, linguistics and even political experimentation - all got under way in the Middle Ages.'

'Of course, there was plenty of ignorance, as there is in every age,' he says. He is discussing a time of visual beauty and literary genius, of break-throughs for women and for individual freedom. Historian Thomas Cahill is seated in the living room of his Manhattan apartment - books and paintings on the walls, a concert piano behind him.

Mysteries of the middle ages by thomas cahill