Quote:🌞 We are the creations of history. We are also the creations of the history in this book. We cannot understand ourselves without understanding this history.
The early modern era in Europe set the mold for the Western world today. It was a complex, tragic, yet pivotal time. It marked the transition between the dominance of the Catholic church throughout Western Europe and the present age of science, reason, and skepticism.
The path through this transition was an exciting yet bloody and sorrowful one. The wars between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rivaled those of the present in cruelty and atrocity. Yet all the participants professed Christianity, forgetting the teachings of Christ while tearing one another apart over religious differences.
Will Durant, author of the monumental eleven-volume series The Story of Civilization, is an unparalleled guide to this culturally rich but brutal and complicated era. He explains how...