"Eleanor [of Aquitaine] loved musical performances, especially the newly
harmonized chansons ...of the troubadours -- of whom her grandfather
had been the first, a sort of knightly Chuck Berry to a younger
generation of Beatles and Rolling Stones."
Full of maps, charts, and beautiful four color images of medieval masterpieces. This gorgeous volume, the fifth in Cahill's Hinges of History series, is as wonderful as time spent in rapt attention to the lectures of your very favorite history professor. I devoured Cahill's earlier volumes, and still contemplate our Western civilization indebtedness to the tireless, scribing monks of How the Irish Saved Civilization (his first work in the series). From Alexandria to Rome to Paris; Constantine to Giotto to Dante; Cahill's range is broad and his mastery is compelling. If you love the language and lore of the age in Europe's past we call "dark," you will thrill to this narrative. Again, Cahill:
"To medieval man, the cosmos was full of 'secret confines,' arcana no one knew
the way to and few knew anything about but which one might stumble upon without
warning. As in those fables rooted in the Middle Ages and collected by the
Brothers Grimm in the the nineteenth century, a secret door or a hidden pathe
might lead the unsuspecting traveler almost anywhere. Like Alice's rabbit hole
or the wardrobe that leads to Narnia or Hildegard's imagine mountain perforated
by windows, reality itself was permeable. "
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