Colish Marcia. Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. — 370 p.Some readers of this book may be surprised by its claim that the foundations of western intellectual history were laid in the Middle Ages and not in classical Greece and Rome or the Judea-Christian tradition. In defense of that claim we argue that the thought of western Europe acquired its particular character not only as a result of the cultural components that flowed into it. Equally important were the attitudes that western thinkers took to their sources and the uses to which they put them. It is certainly true that medieval thinkers expressed concerns, tastes, tolerances, and sensibilities that distinguish this period from other chapters of the western intellectual experience. At the same time, they developed institutions, viewpoints, and methods that mark them as specifically western and that help to explain why medieval Europe is the only traditional society known to history to modernize itself from within, intellectually no less than economically and technologically, enabling Europe to impose its cultural as well as political stamp on much of the non -European world as the Middle Ages drew to a close.From roman Christianity to the Latin christian culture of the early middle ages.
Vernacular culture.
Early medieval civilizations compared.
Latin and vernacular literature.
Mysticism, devotion and heresy.
High and late medieval speculative thought.
The legacy of scholasticism.