Great Minds of the Medieval World

by Dorsey Armstrong

The Middle Ages was a time of major advances in many fields of knowledge, from theology and philosophy to science, medicine, art, literature, and education. Owing to the work of an astonishing range of visionary thinkers, this fascinating period was the era in which the foundations of the modern Western world were laid. In the medieval era's great minds we find the roots of many aspects of today's world - from the religious/philosophical thought of Augustine, Ambrose of Milan, and Thomas Aquinas to the scientific innovations of Avicenna and Alhacen, the enlightened statesmanship of Charlemagne and Lorenzo de Medici, and the literary creations of Dante and Chaucer.

In these 24 lectures, Professor Armstrong leads you on an enthralling journey into the lives of the seminal thinkers of the Middle Ages. In this gallery of extraordinary minds, you'll encounter the leading lights of a world-shaping era, including figures such as Maimonides, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Francesco Petrarch. Professor Armstrong goes to great lengths to bring these historic figures to life, revealing both the great intellectual contributions and the personal strivings, challenges, and triumphs of some of history's most remarkable human beings. These compelling lectures take you deeply into the heart of one of civilization's most dynamic and impactful eras.

Listening Length: 11 hours and 59 minutes

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Medieval, Religion, Historical

12 pages, Audible Audio

First published June 27, 2014

About the author

Dr. Dorsey Armstrong is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Literature at Purdue University, where she has taught since 2002. The holder of an A.B. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from Duke University, she also taught at Centenary College of Louisiana and at California State University, Long Beach. Her research interests include medieval women writers, late-medieval print culture, and the Arthurian legend, on which she has published extensively, including the 2009 book Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur: A New Modern English Translation Based on the Winchester Manuscript and Gender and the Chivalric Community in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, published in 2003. In January 2009, she became editor-in-chief of the academic journal Arthuriana, which publishes the most cutting-edge research on the legend of King Arthur, from its medieval origins to its enactments in the present moment. Her current research project-Mapping Malory's Morte-is an exploration of the role played by geography in Malory's version of the story of King Arthur.

Reviews

[Cookie M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Professor Dorsey Armstrong. She makes Medieval history truly sparkle. I come away from her lectures with a greater understanding of the events and people that shaped our early modern world and with a desire to learn even more. Top rating.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally enjoyable survey of major figures in European (and Muslim and Jewish) intellectual history in this period, though some of the lecturer's choices for inclusion are odd--Lorenzo de Medici? William Caxton?--and too often she gets into describing events rather than discussing ideas (not that that's bad, it just seems a little off topic). She makes sure to mention some women too. I liked the way she starts each lecture by looking back at the previous one or two, and finishes by setting the stage for the next; that helped me develop an organized picture of how these figures stood in relation to one another.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Dorsey Armstrong is the best. I love the way she takes concepts that I'm mildly interested in and leaves me feeling obsessed with the topic by the end of the week of listening to her lectures. While this one wasn't quite as personally engaging as her king Arthur series, I still loved every minute and learned a lot about figures, most of whom i know by name, but couldn't have told you much more than the key points of their fame. The great courses series makes me want to go back to college!

[Rebecka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This course was so great that I've already bought a new one by Dorsey Armstrong, and will most likely continue to do so until there are none left.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The lecturer is more of an expert in literature than philosophy so that makes for a better presentation when it comes to the thought of the great thinkers since she can explain the difficult concepts so that even I could understand them.

I really appreciate the fact that she included women, Muslims, and Jews equally in her presentation. As for me, I never can get enough of Maimonides, Averroes, or Avicena (and my wife watched the segment on Hildegard of Bingen, and loved it). I'm always impressed by great thinkers and I'm going to design a t-shirt and put Avicena on the front, and a man dangling isolated on the back and one more image to indicate the sum of all Dasein in the universe as the totality of all consciousness (each individual sums to the Universe, God, very Leibnizian). I'm going to have a special pleasure in wearing that shirt that honors our great Muslim thinkers (just because I might live in a country who's leader wants to ban all Muslims doesn't mean I have to not honor thinkers for their extraordinary thinking!!!!). I had no idea that Averroes pre-stole so much from Hegel. I was reading Hegel's Logic when I heard that lecture and realized the obvious overlap in their thinking. Neat!

Just what I needed another topic where I had little familiarity with and now I won't be satisfied until I learn much more in this incredible interesting area of thought. I love thought (more than things) and the thought from this period is almost always entwined with religious mumbo jumbo, but that's okay because in the end it's not what they believe with no evidence (faith), but how they reach their conclusions that motivate me.

[Jenny Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorsey is a thoughtful and engaging lecturer, and she’s crafted a useful, interesting, and insightful course. The medieval world is an intellectual space I haven’t engaged as often as I would like; I feel better equipped to read more deeply after this course.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to medieval philosophy.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will probably only retain 2% of this, but the lecturer was engaging.

[Shalene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved listening to this while reading the more detailed Medieval Philosophy at the same time. Some of these figures I was more familiar with than others, but overall I loved hearing how she summarized their contributions. It’s a great overview, and makes it easier to dive deeper into denser books about the same people/topics.

[فؤاد · Rating 2 out of 5]

امیدوار بودم بیشتر یاد بگیرم ازش اما واقعا چیز زیادی برای یاد دادن نداشت. بیشتر زندگینامۀ ویکی‌پدیایی شخصیت‌های برجستۀ قرون وسطی بود نه خلاصه‌ای از اندیشه‌های مهم و اثرگذارشون.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audio download
Augustine of Hippo introduced the phrase 'uti-frui' in his early writings...a phrase roughly meaning his distinction between things that were useful and those that were to be enjoyed (also, enjoying the good (God) and avoiding the bad). I enjoyed more the presentation than the content. (This discussion could get pretty heavy if you want to go down this road...Dorsey didn't do, so neither will I.)

I could go as high as 3.5 since Prof Armstrong is such an entertaining and knowledgeable lecturer...and I could recommend the series with a few caveats.
For starters, the course should really be titled "Some Great Philosophic Minds of the Medieval World...with Emphasis on Western Europe". Undoubtedly, characters like Augustine, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri. Petrarch, (the) de’ Medicis, Thomas Aquinas, Bede, and all the others discussed in these lectures were clever folks who contributed to developing a unique western philosophical thought pattern that we all know and love today. But weren't there others who may have shaped the ways that that philosophy actually propagated through time, shaking and shaping their world in their time in ways that created environments that ultimately shape our world today.
Probably the most glaring omission is Mohammad...was he not a Great Mind from Medieval Times? Equally important may be Attila, Justinian (or at least Procopius), or Osman. I'm sure that these guys had a few clever brain cells, and used them quite well is dispersing ideas and peoples throughout the regions of eastern and western Europe.

It seems that the good professor leans heavily upon the Christian church for her philosophers, whose lifeworks seem to be as apologists for the faith...mostly by using Aristotelian methods. In addition, most of the earlier 'thinkers' wrote mostly for one another, with the general public restricted from access to the manuscripts (either due to doctrine or, more likely, literacy. Good on Dorsey for including Caxton, but why not Gutenberg, too?) For instance, I came away empty on the lectures about Abelard and Heloise, and Hildegard...sure they were pious and devoted, but in what ways did they shape our ways of thinking rationally?

These were good, interesting lectures, but they could have been better. I recommend them to those who are committed to spending time with Harl and Dialeader (as well as other courses from Dorsey). Wait for a really good sale and coupon.

[anna b · Rating 3 out of 5]

What am I thinking? It's slanted towards theological thinkers and luckily for me, humanistic thinkers started to bloom in the later medieval period so it became much more interesting. Nonetheless, a good introduction to many people who I did not and never would have known exist without listening to this lecture. Great if you have interests in the medieval anthropology and theology.

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a point that felt about midway in this series were I was wondering if I had made a mistake in listening to it since it felt like it was just going on and on about theology. To me, a scholar who's great accomplishment is establishing an argument for how to understand the Trinity is rather like a scholar who devoted their work to developing the theory of phlogiston; it could be interesting to see how their mind worked through the issue, but ultimately what the spent so much time on is connected to nothing in the real world. Of course, you could say that about all of theology, but the Trinity is an especially strange doctrine that has little textual basis and may very well have sprung from co-opting pagan traditions of divine trinities of father, mother, and divine child. Fortunately, this was the third of four sections, and the other three sections were quite interesting.

The lecture starts with scholars from the period of transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, people who compiled and preserved knowledge that would form the basis of future scholarship. The second section was on Islamic and Jewish thinkers who adopted, preserved, and expanded upon works from Greek and Roman civilization while Europe was falling into chaos. It was actually the inclusion of these people that convinced me to pick up this lecture, since I recognized names like Avicenna and Averroes from histories of alchemy and I was curious to hear more about them. The third section is, as I mentioned, heavily focused on theological developments and sort of a bore, but still a bit interesting for the historical context the lectures provide about the development of universities and such. And the final section features minds from the transition of the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period (ie, the Renaissance).

There is quite a bit of material covered in this series and I don't retain very much specific about most of the featured minds, but I liked learning the broad development of scholarship and thought, and also a bit of the contextual history of this period since I have previously, and rather deliberately, avoided studying European history in favor of pretty much anywhere else.

[Hamish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adequate. Doesn't transcend the material.

Dorsey Armstrong uses as many clichés as a journalist.

The medieval intellectual world is difficult to care about. It mostly consists of theological disputes which seem moot to vacuous to a modern sensibilities. "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" and all that.

The central question of medieval thought is therefore: what's at stake? Why should we consider the writings of Thomas Aquinas or St Augustine as anything more than intellectual white noise?

This lecture series doesn't directly address the above question. Other places which did address it are the blog Ex Urbe and the other Great Courses series The Birth of the Modern Mind.

But if you read between the lines of this lecture series you can put forth some tentative answers.

The significance of Thomas Aquinas is the easiest: although he was a theologian, he was a _natural_ theologan. That is, he tried to resolve tensions between theology and science (specifically the logic and empirical observations of Aristotle). This is an important step: transitioning from "theology is true" to "theology is true, except where it is contradicted by science".

We might say that St Augustine was important because he put down the most articulate "first guess" of what the world is like. Perhaps his innovation was the transformation of beliefs from "whatever the authority has made up today" to "a consistent and expressible set of propositions". It's much easier to recognise that a belief is wrong than it is to recognise that you have a belief in the first place.

[Zach Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, but I'm in a good mood, so I'll round up. Armstrong is super knowledgeable and a good storyteller, though she often leans too much on platitudes in speaking ("...and the world would never be the same again" etc. etc.).

This was all sporadically interesting, though mostly at the look at the time period as a whole than many of the "great minds" presented. Some I'd love to learn more about, like the good-guy Muslim sultan Saladin and the bad-boy Christian thinker Peter Abelard who pissed off enough people to get his manhood chopped off, but a lot of the philosophy is based around Christian ideals that I guess I can't fully engage with as a dyed-in-the-wool heretic. By the fifth great thinker whose main contribution was writing about how one could engage in Aristotlean philosophy while still being a Christian, I felt a snooze coming on.

FUN FACTS
Did you know Jewish people in the medieval age got forced into money lending because it was considered un-Christian to lend money with interest, so they made the Jews do it? And then they blamed them for the Bubonic Plague because they lived in ghettos and were more-or-less isolated from it?

It took 2,000 cows to make a Bible in the Middle Ages before the printing press!

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would recommend this book to anyone who does not know who these people are. If you do, then it is rather repetitive, as Dorsey does not really get into any one individual very deeply, it is just an excursion of the medieval world. All the illustrations are in black and white. The bibliography is scarce, so this is basically a stand-alone book. There are some questions at the end of the chapter, but it gives no answers, so it is basically rhetorical.

The people are Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory the Great, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, Charlemagne, and Alfred the Great f(this is the Christian grouping).Avicenna,

Alhazen, Averroes and Maimonides, Rashi and Saladin the destroyer of Jerusalem (the Moslem grouping that she adores. A major problem in the book, this constant imperative that we owe all to the Moslem. It does not mention their failings, just the West's).

Petrarch, Dante, Chaucer, Ockham, d'Medici, Malor, Aquinas, Peter Lombard. (Medieval Christians who owe their work to the Muslims).

There are a few medieval women in the group, like Christine de Pisan and Abelard and Heloise and Hildegard of Bingen.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+
For me, philosophy has always sounded far more interesting than it has turned out. The discussions make my teeth ache so I have learned to avoid philosophers as much as possible. I was lured into this Great Courses lecture series by the presenter, my favorite--Dorsey Armstrong. Her enthusiasm and ability to make even the most obscure topics somewhat understandable encouraged me to dip my toes into this offering on medieval philosophers.

There are 24 philosophers introduced in this 12 hr. series, many of whom I had never heard of previously. In 30 minutes allotted to each, Professor Armstrong distilled their ideas and influence into the most significant and relevant points. At the very least, I my respect for the devotion they lavished on their vocations increased. I may even further investigate a few of them.

A talented, committed teacher can make all the difference. Thank you, Dorsey Armstrong.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wide-ranging, overview of key thinkers of the medieval period. Armstrong's lectures cover thinkers from Augustine up through figures like Petrarch, Medici, and Mallory. She covers Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers; and also includes three female thinkers. The focus is mostly philosophers and theologians, but there are poets, writers, political figures, and she closes with William Caxton, the first English printer.

All in all, a useful introduction and overview of the key ideas and thinkers ranging over more than 1000 years. This is intellectual history, so there is not much in the way of in-depth discussions of the arguments and explications of the ideas. Armstrong is providing the intellectual and historical context for these thinkers and summary of their ideas and influence.

Armstrong's delivery is clear, enjoyable, and interesting.

[Paul Conroy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t even bother - this book is crap!

If you’re only interested in obscure 3rd rate thinkers, who may have written a poem or been bi-lingual, whose stories can be massaged to appear that they were staunch feminists, advocating gender equality or some such, then you may like the book.

However, there is precious little on science, math or the foundations of Medieval thinking, which were scholarly works from Ireland, which she lists briefly without comment, and labels these scholars as British.

Also, she makes extensive use of Latin phrases, each one mispronounced - betraying a lack of familiarity with Latin. How can you bill yourself as a scholar of great medieval thinking and not know Latin?

[Mary A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! So many amazing thinkers and ideas here. Some I knew something about, some I’d heard of and some who were totally new to me.
As the church was so intricately involved in most of life in the middle ages, a lot of those discussed had made theological contributions (mainly Christian - but some Jewish and Muslim thinkers were mentioned).
Many of the ideas covered here were extremely complex and Dorsey Armstrong was very good at summarising these in a way a lay person could understand and appreciate to some degree.
She also has a most engaging and enthusiastic style. Her love of the period comes through clearly.
I would be happy to listen to more of her lectures.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 3 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

The great news is that I can listen to a book a day at work. The bad news is that I can’t keep up with decent reviews. So I’m going to give up for now and just rate them. I hope to come back to some of the most significant things I listen to and read them and then post a review.

[Katherine R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Armstrong's lecture style. The information she provides is both educational and entertaining and I often find myself seeking out further information about different things and people she mentions as she goes. It's because of her I read the 13th century "The Book of the City of Ladies" to better know what Christine De Pisan was all about. It really helps with any college course if the lecturer is likeable and tells the information in an accessible way so I really appreciate the ones I find.

[Shannan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My to-read list has now been expanded into medieval literature thanks to this course, and I couldn’t be more excited! Truly, the minds of our ancestors were astounding things and I’m so grateful that they haven’t been forgotten and we still have access to them in the form of their writings today. Dorsey Armstrong, as usual, was a great teacher who did especially well in this course with sparking interest and excitement about the intellect of the Middle Ages.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arsmtrong's lecturing style is engaging and passionate as always, but this course nevertheless was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how well each lecture kept my interest - largely because quite a few of these great minds spent a lot of their time and intellect on pondering scripture and religious concepts, which I have little to no interest in.

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love Professor Armstrong’s teaching and all the content here, from St. Augustine through the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars and thinkers of the dark and Middle Ages, up to the advent of the printing press first coming to England. Really insightful for the scholastic, religious, and intellectual events and evolutions between Constantine and Shakespeare.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very entertaining and engaging. I loved learning some biographical vignettes of some of the influential figures of the medieval world, and now have a research interest generated that will carry me into 2022 with a special project.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly what I was looking for. A glimpse into the Middle Ages and some help understanding how history progressed from Ancient Rome and Greece to the Renaissance. I'm excited to go through the author's course on turning points in Medieval History next.

[John Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent course about many great minds that have been left behind mostly because of when they were born (Dark Ages). Dr Armstrong makes you want to know more about these amazing minds. Unfortunately many of their works are not available online and limited amounts.

[Lori Gibbany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish there had been more than one person lecturing in this course. The material was great .

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting read. Well presented lecture series about this period of time. Thoroughly enjoyed it.