9 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
HBO fantasy drama series based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels — depicting a medieval-style world of dynastic struggle, political intrigue, and warfare — which became the most-watched television series in history and brought sophisticated political realism to fantasy television.
French abbess and philosopher — correspondent with Peter Abelard — abbess of the Paraclete — who was one of the most educated women of the medieval period and whose letters to Abelard are the most remarkable personal philosophical correspondence from a medieval woman.
French philosopher and theologian — who created conceptualism (the middle way between realism and nominalism) — whose affair with Héloïse and subsequent castration is the most famous personal catastrophe in medieval intellectual history — whose Sic et Non established the scholastic method.
English friar and philosopher — who argued for empirical observation and experimentation in natural philosophy centuries before Francis Bacon — made contributions to optics, calendar reform, and the theory of lenses — sometimes called the first scientist.
Tom Holland's 2008 narrative history of the years around 1000 AD — when Christendom as a distinct civilization was forged from the multiple crises of the Viking, Magyar, and Saracen raids — arguing that the Church's reform movement and the year 1000's apocalyptic expectations transformed Latin Christianity into Western civilization.
Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's study of the Holy Grail legend through Jungian symbolic analysis — Emma Jung began it, von Franz completed it after Emma's death — showing how the Grail quest embodies the individuation process.
Chris Wickham's 2009 survey of Europe from 400 to 1000 AD — the Penguin History of Europe volume covering the Early Middle Ages — arguing that the collapse of the Roman state was the central event of early medieval history and tracing how different societies responded to it.
Marco Polo's account (dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while in Genoese prison) of his travels through the Mongol Empire and China — the first detailed European account of East Asian civilization — which introduced the wealth of China, Persia, and the Mongol Empire to Western readers.
Italian Dominican friar and philosopher — author of the Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles — who synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology — the most important theologian of the Catholic Church and the founder of Thomism.