Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter [Audiobook]

The essential introduction to the Middle Ages by the bestselling author. We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating book, people's horizons-their knowledge, experience, and understanding of the world-expanded dramatically. Life was utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, marking the transition from a warrior-led society to that of Shakespeare. Medieval Horizons provides the perfect primer to the era as a whole. It outlines the enormous cultural changes that took place—from literacy to living standards, inequality, and even the developing sense of self—thereby correcting misconceptions and presenting the period as a revolutionary age of fundamental importance in the development of the Western world.