The World at First Light – A New History of the Renaissance

This is a magisterial study, as its sheer length and corresponding depth suggests. It explores the cultural and historical preconditions and cultural rediscoveries enabling the European Renaissance. The author argues that the media revolution enabled by the printing press, and the advent of modern science were the central factors. It also reports on the dark side of the era and discusses why the Renaissance took place in the West. He identifies its legacy as the art of critical thinking, the emergence of the modern state, and the genesis of democracy, mediating modernity and the ‘rise of the West.’ The author is sanguine as to whether history will end in catastrophe or a new Renaissance – he thinks the prospects bleak, but death can always be followed by rebirth. One additional culture that he might have mentioned as a forerunner of the Renaissance is that of Occitania, destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade, and where the Cathars promoted reformation and the Troubadours played a part in the changing status of women.