Prologue. The collapse of learning -- The saving of the texts, 500-750 -- Charlemagne restores the discipline of learning -- Conformity and diversity in the Christian communities of the late first millennium -- Authority and dissent in the medieval church, 1000-1250 -- Abelard and the battle for reason -- The cry of libertas, the rebirth of the city-state -- Success and failure within the medieval university -- Medieval philosophy : a reopening or a dead-end? -- The glimmerings of a scientific revival, 1200-1350 -- Dante, Marsilius and Boccaccio and their worlds -- Humanism and the challenge to the scholastics -- The exuberance of Florentine humanism -- The flowering of the Florentine Renaissance -- Plato re-enters the western mind -- The printing press : what was published and why? -- The loss of papal authority and the rise of the laity, 1350-1550 -- Defining global space: the mapping of the New World -- How Europe learned to see again : Leonardo and Vasalius -- Exploring the natural world in the sixteenth century -- Imagining princely politics, from Utopia to the Machiavellian prince -- Broadening horizons : from the Laocoon to the academies -- Encountering the peoples of the 'Newe founde worldes', 1492-1610 -- The Reformation : new perspectives for the Western mind -- The world of Catholic renewal -- Montaigne and Hamlet : peace or turmoil in the solitary soul? -- Absolutist France versus the Dutch Republic : a study of political contrasts -- British's revolutionary century -- Envisaging an ideal society in the seventeenth century -- From natural philosophy into science. The astronomers -- Was there an English scientific revolution? -- Did the seventeenth century see the making of the modern mind? -- Was there really 'a reopening of the western mind?.