The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment

Historian Freeman (The Closing of the Western Mind) skillfully plows through substantial ground in this doorstop of an intellectual history of Western Europe. Freeman traces key shifts in intellectual development from the end of the Roman Empire in 500 CE to the early Enlightenment, including theological, philosophical, political, and artistic arcs, meticulously following the threads of classical Greek and Roman thinkers as they became woven into the fabric of Western thought, from Thomas Aquinas’s embrace of Aristotle to Italian Renaissance humanists’ revival of Plato. Freeman also reminds readers of the gap in transmission of thought during early medieval times, when few written texts existed to preserve knowledge. As well, readers are guided through the development of the printing press, which the author notes revolutionized the transmission of knowledge (though didn’t immediately allow for flourishing intellectual thought), and how the Catholic church “reasserted itself globally” beginning in the 16th century, with Freeman drawing on a dizzying number of sources (and including color illustrations plus an extensive bibliography). General readers may be overwhelmed by the breadth and depth, but specialists will delight in the considered, comprehensive details of Western European triumphs, discoveries, and setbacks. As ambitious as it is informative, this will have historians of all stripes rapt. (Feb.)