Post-Classical (500 CE - 1450 CE)

On Diverse Arts (De diversis artibus)

Theophilus’ De diversis artibus is the only complete treatise on art to survive from the High Middle Ages.

Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia

Bernard of Clairvaux was abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, in Burgundy, France, and a well-known preacher who travelled widely and was involved with many of the most pressing issues of his day, from papal power to the Crusades.

On What Was Done In His Administration (De administratione), 1144–1148

In the later 1140s, Abbot Suger of the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis, outside Paris, wrote an account of his extensive project to rebuild and redecorate his abbey church.

Victoria and Albert Museum

Analyzing Music

Everywhere you go, there it is.

Primer: Comparative History

Comparison is used in many different ways in world history, both implicitly and explicitly.

Primer: Big History

Big History is an approach to world history that takes as its subject the story of the whole of the Universe, from its creation, 13.8 billion years ago, in the Big Bang.

Salisbury Crags

Before about 1800, most people in the Christian world assumed that the earth was just a few thousand years old. But growing interest in fossils and strange geological formations made some people think the earth must actually be much older.

History of the Earth in a Cycle

Our sense of time has been extended into the deep past in the last two centuries or so, and particularly since the 1950s, when Willard Libby showed that you could use the breakdown of radioactive molecules such as Carbon-14 to date events thousands of years before there were any written documents

Primer: Gender in World History

Gender history developed in the 1980s out of women’s history, when historians familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men.