Reading Guides

The Hinges of History Series

How did we become the people we are? How real is history? Is what “everyone knows” about Western civilization correct?

These are complicated questions. They deserve careful, considered answers. Answers that set a scene, create a mood, engage and enlighten us, show us the hope that people before us had, and tell us previously untold stories. But where can we look for such answers? Must readers and learners resign themselves to academic tomes that “prove” one theory or another? That offer mostly details about a battle won, a border crossed? That force them to struggle to understand without necessarily rewarding them for their efforts?

Not if they enter The Hinges of History®

Author Thomas Cahill’s series of books tell the other stories of Western history. Instead of turning his light on war and outrage and catastrophe, natural and man-made, Cahill presents the narratives of grace, the stories of great gift-givers, and the evolution of our Western sensibility. He recounts essential moments when everything was at stake. Cahill wonders what there is in our history that is peculiar to the West, that gives us our characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and valuing that make us different from other people. By tracing the origin of...

Heretics and Heroes

1. What is Cahill referring to when he writes about “philosophical tennis” in the book’s Prelude? Who are some of the major players in this intellectual match? Why might the author have chosen to introduce and discuss this phenomenon at the opening of Heretics and Heroes in particular?

2. What are the Sicilian Vespers? What impact did this have on the reunification of Christendom and on the papacy? According to Cahill, the Sicilian Vespers paved the way for which phenomenon that shaped modern Europe?

3. What effect did the Black Death have upon the 12th century Renaissance? How did it affect people’s social mobility? What link is there between the Black Death and racism? What representative viewpoints or philosophies come from the works of Giovanni Boccacio and Dante according to the author? What commonalities are evident among the works of both; and conversely, how did their beliefs differ?

4. Who are some of the people Cahill identifies as “Lutherans before Luther”? What were some of their religious beliefs? What changes or reforms did they call for? How were they received? In particular, how did Henry IV respond to these people?

5. What were the three communications revolutions? What innovations were characteristic of each? What...

Mysteries of the Middle Ages

And the Beginning of the Modern World

It’s been more than a decade since the tremendously successful publication of How the Irish Saved Civilization, the first book in Thomas Cahill’s illuminating series. Mysteries of the Middle Ages owes much to that volume on medieval Irish history, in many ways picking up where the other left off.

Mysteries of the Middle Ages is a rollicking tour of the High Middle Ages, the 12th, 13th, and early 14th centuries. By this time, European barbarians have settled down and become shopkeepers and tradesmen, ladies and knights, nuns and monks. Though the elegant yet brutal world of classical Greek and Roman civilizations is long gone, many of the best insights of classical times were being recovered in the manuscripts so lovingly preserved by Irish scribes and others. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, this was a time of renewal and discovery.

Each chapter opens another door to this strange but exciting medieval world, and through these doors we come in intimate contact with people who lived eight centuries ago. We share their hope and joys, their terrors and sorrows, their jokes. We ride with Chaucer’s pilgrims from London to Canterbury. We make music with the nuns of Bingen,...

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

Why the Greeks Matter

“Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.” (page 264)

Greek influence infiltrates Western art, politics, philosophy, language, storytelling, military maneuvers–virtually every defining aspect of the West’s viability. Why has the Greek imprint been so enduring, and so all-encompassing? In this fourth volume of his Hinges of History® series, Thomas Cahill invites us to join him on a voyage that explores the remarkable achievements and contradictions of ancient Greek society. Piecing together shards of myth, archaeology, and history, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea demonstrates how a passion for becoming aristoi (the best), combined with a significant amount of luck, produced a culture whose innovations and achievements make for singular legends and legacies.

A tour that spans warriors and politicians, thinkers and playwrights, and of course a pantheon of deities, this installment in the series captures crucial ingredients in the very creation of Western civilization. As Thomas Cahill points out the peaks and valleys of Greek experience, his enlightening anecdotes on everything from etymology to Athenian kitsch reveal a constant...

Desire of the Everlasting Hills

The World Before and After Jesus

“The deep truth of the matter, both in the New Testament and in all the subsequent cultural development of the West . . . is that we all killed Jesus–and are forgiven.”

(page 331)

Jewish or Christian, believer or atheist, most people have some understanding of who Jesus is, what his life was about, and how he influences us today. But some understanding is not nearly enough to appreciate the importance of this man and the movement that began with his teachings almost two thousand years ago. In his new book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Cahill plunges us into Jesus’s world, showing us where and how and with whom Jesus lived. He examines Jesus’s teachings and misinterpretations of them. He shows us the Jewish and Gentile evangelists who wrote the Gospels, and examines the importance of Paul’s letters to the development of Christianity, to spreading the news of Jesus’s teachings.

So who was this man whom so many called Messiah? Whom so many followed? Whom so many believed was the medium through which God had fulfilled his promises to Israel? Who helps bring Gentiles to Judaism? Cahill gives us all that is rich and essential as he...

The Gifts of the Jews

How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels

“So, wayyelekh Avram (‘Avram went’)–two of the boldest words in all literature.” (page 63)

Western civilization would not be what it is today, were it not for our Jewish ancestors. Christian, atheist, Jew, believer, each of us can look at Avram and see that had he not responded to what his God told him (lekh-lekha–“go forth”), we would not be the people we are today. As Cahill boldly puts it, “There is no way that it could ever have been ‘self-evident that all men are created equal’ without the intervention of the Jews.” Cahill backs up his bold statement with history. With stories. With details and informed opinion.

The Jewish people shaped the very way we think and live. In The Gifts of the Jews, we learn that processive time, individual destiny, and social justice are so peculiar to the Jews that, for all practical purposes, they invented them. Jewish men and women left their homes and journeyed when God told them to, changing who they were, changing who we are. We see it in the stories of the Bible. From Avram, who gave us the possibility of faith in...

How the Irish Saved Civilization

The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

“Without the mission of the Irish monks . . . the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one–a world without books.” (page 4)

How did a remote island sparsely populated by illiterate, semi-nomadic warrior barbarians become an emerald isle of saints and scholars who saved Western literature?

Well, Cahill tells us, look to Patrick, who was brought in chains to Ireland and dedicated himself to making sure nobody would ever arrive that way again. Grafting traditional Christian teachings to the positive elements of Irish myths and magic rooted in nature, Patrick planted a message that spoke directly to the Irish psyche and heart. Condemning slavery, promoting reading and writing, bringing the Gospel to barbarians, Patrick brought a non-Roman form of Christianity to an island of people fierce in their loyalty and poetry and courage and violence. He looked at the bright side of human experience and saw that “even slave traders can turn into liberators, even murderers can act as peacemakers, even barbarians can take their places among the nobility of heaven.”

From here, Cahill shows us the Irish scribes, monks...