Prologue. The collapse of learning -- The saving of the texts, 500- -- Charlemagne restores the discipline of learning -- Conformity and diversity in the Christian communities of the late first millennium -- The challenges of Christian leadership. Authority and dissent in the medieval church, 1000- -- Abelard and the battle for reason -- The cry of libertas, the rebirth of the city-state -- 'Completely new, without any real precedent and with an exceptional historical destiny' : success and failure within the medieval university -- The complexities of medieval philosophy : a reopening or a dead-end? -- The glimmerings of a scientific revival, 1200-1350? -- New directions in literature and political thought : Dante, Marsilius and Boccaccio and their worlds -- 'I snarl at the stupid Aristotelians' : humanism and the challenge to the scholastics -- 'It is but in our own day that men dare boast that they see the dawn of better things' : 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? -- Filling the vacuum : the loss of papal authority and the rise of the laity, 1350- -- 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. Recovering the ancient world -- Montaigne and Hamlet : peace or turmoil in the solitary soul? -- Defining global space : the mapping of the new world -- Encountering the peoples of the 'Newe founde worldes', 1492- -- Reformation : a restoration of Christian authority? -- The world of Catholic renewal -- Absolutist France versus the Dutch Republic : a study of contrasts in seventeenth century politics -- The seventeenth century : the most revolutionary century in the history of modern Britain? -- Thinking politically. Envisaging an ideal society in the seventeenth century -- From natural philosophy into science. The astronomers -- Was there an English scientific revolution? -- 'Once in a lifetime we must demolish everything' : (Descartes) did the seventeenth century see the making of the modern mind? -- Bringing it all together : was there really 'a reopening of the western mind?.