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The Development of European Civilization
In almost every way that matters, historical Europe was the laboratory in which the world you now live in was conceived and tested. And you'll be living with the consequences for the rest of your life. These 48 lectures lead you through the doors of that laboratory and guide you through the development of Europe from the late Middle Ages through the eve of World War II. As you follow Professor Bartlett through the dramatic story of European history, you'll learn about the major ideologies and "isms" that bubbled forth from Europe's constantly fermenting cauldron of debate and conflict, including absolutism, scientism, rationalism, capitalism, nationalism, liberalism, and totalitarianism. You'll investigate the forces that intermingled to create the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying economic and social upheavals that would, in turn, create so many more. You'll also make sense of the European ideologies of government, including the rule of law, the concept of "the consent of the governed," taxation, an independent judiciary, and other concepts. You'll explore the new roles for religion in European life, from the end of the traditional union of altar and throne to great upheavals such as the Protestant Reformation and the Great Schism. And you'll witness the evolution of the European class system, which influenced the social forces that swirled around it just as much as it was influenced by them. Rather than offering a laundry list of dates, events, and famous individuals, Professor Bartlett leaves you instead with an understanding of historical and social causality. More important: He offers you the chance to experience Europe's development from a European perspective.
25 pages, Audiobook
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Kenneth R. Bartlett
28 books20 followersKenneth Bartlett is a professor of History & Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where he served as the editor of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme and president of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. He has received multiple teaching awards and was appointed the first director of the Officer of Teaching Advancement for the University of Toronto. Professor Bartlett has written three books, including Humanism and the Northern Renaissance.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 17, 2020
Bartlet provides a cogent and always intelligent overview of European history from the middle ages to World War II. Of course, to cover such a long period, many important events must be excluded. For instance, the Mongol invasions of Russia, The Vikings, and the Norman invasion of England are not discussed at all.
However, he uses his time judiciously to cover many important topics, such as the development of feudalism and its gradual decline, the reformation and religious wars, and especially the gradual and halting movement towards democracy and the ever present risk of violent unrest.
The title is a bit ridiculous. This course focuses on political history and the structure of society and not at all on the arts and very little on the experiences of common people, let alone more modern considerations such as gender role changes. There are excellent and lengthy explanations of the impacts of the treaties of Westphalia and Versailles and the Congress of Vienna, but there is more to civilization than that.
Even science is discussed primarily as a prelude to the Enlightenment and thus to the French revolution and Napoleon. Subsequently there is a long, and to my view controversial, section about Darwin and the impact of social Darwinism on the development of nationalism and racism in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I highly recommend this as a concise and intelligent history of Europe, but as always one should listen with a critical mind.
However, he uses his time judiciously to cover many important topics, such as the development of feudalism and its gradual decline, the reformation and religious wars, and especially the gradual and halting movement towards democracy and the ever present risk of violent unrest.
The title is a bit ridiculous. This course focuses on political history and the structure of society and not at all on the arts and very little on the experiences of common people, let alone more modern considerations such as gender role changes. There are excellent and lengthy explanations of the impacts of the treaties of Westphalia and Versailles and the Congress of Vienna, but there is more to civilization than that.
Even science is discussed primarily as a prelude to the Enlightenment and thus to the French revolution and Napoleon. Subsequently there is a long, and to my view controversial, section about Darwin and the impact of social Darwinism on the development of nationalism and racism in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I highly recommend this as a concise and intelligent history of Europe, but as always one should listen with a critical mind.
June 22, 2018
One of the better great courses I've listened too, It show the evolution of European thought from St Augustine/Francis to Darwin to Marx/Ingles. It emphasizes the enlightenment and Darwin a bit more then I would of liked and spent a little bit too little time on the middle ages but these are minor nitpicks in an otherwise great course.
April 12, 2022
A series of lectures on the origins of European history. Extremely detailed and informative.
September 8, 2026
The Development of European Civilization is a 48-lecture course in the Great Courses series that surveys European thought from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of World War II. It examines the evolution of ideas, social movements, and political institutions, linking them to the economic and social conditions of their times. Its distinctive perspective makes the course valuable for understanding how modern thought and political structures emerged and matured—and the challenges they continue to face.
Several lessons stand out. To begin with, the Enlightenment is the course’s key turning point. One of its strengths is the way it traces the intellectual lineage of major Enlightenment thinkers, not by treating them in isolation but by contrasting and connecting their ideas. We see how one idea responds to another and how abstract principles gradually evolve into theories of political organization.
Thomas Hobbes proposed the social contract as a new foundation for governmental authority. To escape the insecurity and violence of the state of nature, individuals, according to Hobbes, entered into a social contract by authorizing a sovereign—meaning the supreme political authority within a state—to exercise their collective power and maintain peace. In Hobbes’s theory, the sovereign could be a monarch, an assembly, or another governing body, but it held final authority over the state. This "social contract" theory challenged the traditional idea that political authority rested solely on divine sanction or hereditary lineage: government could instead be justified through a rational account of human interests and consent. Yet Hobbes remained conservative in one crucial respect. He treated the sovereign’s authority as extremely broad and generally not subject to ordinary resistance by the people. Although he offered a revolutionary explanation for the source of political authority, his sovereign still possessed something close to the absolute power of traditional monarchs.
John Locke took a different view of the social contract. He argued that people possess fundamental natural rights—especially life, liberty, and property—that they do not surrender entirely when they enter political society. Individuals do transfer certain powers to government, including the authority to make laws and enforce them for the common good, but government may not exercise those powers arbitrarily. Political authority is therefore conditional, and rulers have obligations under the social contract just as the people do. If a government violates those obligations and persistently threatens the people’s fundamental rights, it forfeits its authority, and citizens may reclaim their political power, including by resisting or overthrowing the government.
The contrast between Hobbes and Locke illustrates a larger theme of the course: ideas evolve through argument, modification, and opposition. Hobbes helped detach political legitimacy from divine authority; Locke carried the argument further by limiting government and strengthening the rights of the governed.
Moving from England to France, Enlightenment thinkers approached similar questions from different directions. Voltaire took a more pragmatic approach. He opposed many existing social institutions and was particularly critical of Christianity as an institution of political and social power. Instead, he advocated deism: a divine being might account for the universe’s original “first cause” and supreme intelligence. It also provides a foundation for morality. However, it is not necessarily the God of institutional Christianity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau took a more radical view. He valued freedom above almost everything else and developed the idea of a collective or general will. Yet his conception of freedom contained a tension: if people failed to understand or embrace genuine freedom, they could be “forced to be free.” Such thinking could support mass movements that claimed to embody the “will of the people” and imposed that will on dissenters. The pursuit of collective freedom could thus justify coercion.
Montesquieu added another dimension. He proposed a design principle to preserve liberty and government accountability - what we call "checks and balances" today. He also recognized that political institutions do not arise in a vacuum: they are shaped by a country’s culture, history, and social conditions. At the same time, institutions themselves shape the civilization in which they operate. Montesquieu thus bridges abstract political values and practical institutional design—from asking what values a society should embrace to asking how institutions can preserve them.
Denis Diderot represents yet another aspect of the Enlightenment. By leading the enormous effort to compile the Encyclopédie, he helped organize and disseminate human knowledge. Its significance lay not only in the information it contained but also in its emphasis on knowledge, evidence, factual information, and intellectual inquiry. The project embodied the Enlightenment belief that knowledge should be collected, examined, organized, and made accessible rather than controlled by traditional authorities.
Taken together, these thinkers show why the Enlightenment occupies such a central place in the course. Hobbes questioned the traditional source of political legitimacy; Locke turned the social contract into a defense of individual rights; Voltaire challenged institutional religion and inherited authority; Rousseau elevated freedom and collective political participation; Montesquieu translated ideals into institutional design; and Diderot advanced the dissemination of knowledge. Their ideas differed sharply, but together they helped establish the foundations of modern European political and social thought.
Beyond the Enlightenment treatment, another distinctive feature of the course is its emphasis on the connection between ideas and material conditions. Intellectual movements, political institutions, and social changes are repeatedly traced to underlying economic and social transformations.
The weakening of feudalism, for example, helped liberate agricultural workers, while improvements in agricultural productivity freed, even displaced, labor and resources for the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization, in turn, strengthened science, rationality, technological innovation, and capitalist thought. Throughout the course, political and intellectual movements are similarly linked to workers’ living conditions, fragmented governance, economic change, military defeat, and other social pressures.
The broader lesson is that Western civilization did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Technology and economic change shaped political institutions and philosophical ideas, while ideas in turn reshaped society. By grounding intellectual history in social reality, the course offers a persuasive explanation for why certain ideas emerged when they did and why they attracted followers.
From this perspective, the course’s larger narrative follows two intertwined paths. One is the advance of science and rational thought. Scientific methods and technological innovation helped drive the Industrial Revolution; social contract theory supplied a rational rather than theological basis for political authority; Darwin’s theory of evolution crossed from biology into social and political thought, sometimes dangerously; and utilitarian thinkers tried to organize society rationally around principles of optimization and the maximization of welfare.
The other path is humanitarian. Industrial and economic progress generated enormous wealth, but also severe human costs. Concern for workers, movements toward greater equality, and progressive reforms arose partly in response to the suffering and inequality that accompanied material growth.
Seen this way, rational and material advancement on one side and humanitarian and moral response on the other often moved alternately, like walking with one foot and then the other. Material and technological progress created new possibilities but also new problems; humanitarian and political movements then arose in response. A durable balance between prosperity and humane treatment remained a goal, but one seldom fully achieved.
A further lesson emerges when the course turns to political crisis: prolonged social distress can make radical ideas attractive. The French Revolution followed a long period of political tension, economic hardship, and social inequality, some of them as the aftermath of a long religious conflict. Marxism gained influence amid the brutal exploitation and degrading living conditions of many industrial workers. In Germany after World War I, military defeat, political instability, economic dislocation, and the harsh burdens of the postwar settlement helped create conditions in which Nazism and Hitler could gain mass support.
The implication extends beyond European history. When a group experiences persistent suffering, deprivation, humiliation, or exclusion, the consequences do not stop with that group. Such distress can destabilize the larger political system and increase the appeal of radical movements promising drastic solutions. Concern for disadvantaged groups is therefore not only a matter of compassion; it also affects the security, resilience, and long-term stability of society as a whole.
Precisely because the course presents such a coherent interpretation, it also invites the question of what that interpretation leaves out. It offers a valuable perspective on European history, but not the only one. Several additions would make the picture more comprehensive.
First, greater attention could be given to the evolution of European philosophy itself, especially figures such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Their influence extended far beyond academic philosophy into morality, religion, politics, culture, psychology, and later intellectual movements. A fuller account would examine how such thinkers transformed European understandings of knowledge, morality, freedom, meaning, and human nature.
Second, Europe’s inheritance from ancient Greece and Rome deserves more emphasis. European civilization did not begin with the Enlightenment, nor can its distinctive development be explained entirely by modern social and economic forces. Greek philosophy, Roman law, classical ideas of citizenship and government, and the later rediscovery and reinterpretation of classical traditions all shaped Europe’s intellectual foundations. Social and economic forces mattered greatly, but examining how these inherited traditions influence Europe's journey to modernity would be interesting and insightful.
Third, beyond tracing how particular ideas waxed and waned, it would be useful to ask which values and worldviews endured. These include commitments, however incomplete and historically inconsistent, to certain governing principles and social values. Christianity also profoundly shaped European ideas of morality, human dignity, community, obligation, and social order, even though its institutional and cultural influence has declined in many parts of modern Europe. Comparing these enduring values with those of other civilizations would help clarify what Europeans came to regard as fundamental, what was historically contingent, and what distinguished the European experience.
Fourth, while the course persuasively emphasizes economic and social conditions as forces behind historical change, it should not understate the role of exceptional individuals. Social circumstances may make certain ideas possible or necessary, but great thinkers conceive them and refine them into a form ready for society's consumption. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and others did more than reflect their surroundings. They reframed problems, created new intellectual systems, and gave later generations new ways to understand society. A fuller interpretation should therefore recognize influence in both directions: economic and social forces shape thought, while thought reshapes institutions, economies, and social life.
Finally, the course’s title raises a broader question: civilization encompasses more than political ideas, social movements, economic change, and institutions. European literature, art, architecture, and music also reveal changing views of religion, nature, individuality, society, beauty, suffering, freedom, and human existence. Movements such as the Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism cannot be understood through politics and economics alone.
Studying figures such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt would therefore enrich the course’s account. Their work preserves dimensions of Europe’s values, sensibility, and emotional life that political theory cannot capture, making European history both intellectually important and culturally compelling.
Ultimately, The Development of European Civilization offers a valuable framework for understanding how ideas, institutions, economic conditions, technology, and social movements shaped modern Europe. Its emphasis on the Enlightenment and on the tension between material progress and humanitarian concerns is especially illuminating, even if the course leaves room for deeper treatment of philosophy, religion, classical traditions, and the arts. Rather than a complete account, it is best understood as a compelling interpretive lens—one that shows European civilization as the product of an ongoing interaction among social conditions, intellectual creativity, and human aspirations.
Several lessons stand out. To begin with, the Enlightenment is the course’s key turning point. One of its strengths is the way it traces the intellectual lineage of major Enlightenment thinkers, not by treating them in isolation but by contrasting and connecting their ideas. We see how one idea responds to another and how abstract principles gradually evolve into theories of political organization.
Thomas Hobbes proposed the social contract as a new foundation for governmental authority. To escape the insecurity and violence of the state of nature, individuals, according to Hobbes, entered into a social contract by authorizing a sovereign—meaning the supreme political authority within a state—to exercise their collective power and maintain peace. In Hobbes’s theory, the sovereign could be a monarch, an assembly, or another governing body, but it held final authority over the state. This "social contract" theory challenged the traditional idea that political authority rested solely on divine sanction or hereditary lineage: government could instead be justified through a rational account of human interests and consent. Yet Hobbes remained conservative in one crucial respect. He treated the sovereign’s authority as extremely broad and generally not subject to ordinary resistance by the people. Although he offered a revolutionary explanation for the source of political authority, his sovereign still possessed something close to the absolute power of traditional monarchs.
John Locke took a different view of the social contract. He argued that people possess fundamental natural rights—especially life, liberty, and property—that they do not surrender entirely when they enter political society. Individuals do transfer certain powers to government, including the authority to make laws and enforce them for the common good, but government may not exercise those powers arbitrarily. Political authority is therefore conditional, and rulers have obligations under the social contract just as the people do. If a government violates those obligations and persistently threatens the people’s fundamental rights, it forfeits its authority, and citizens may reclaim their political power, including by resisting or overthrowing the government.
The contrast between Hobbes and Locke illustrates a larger theme of the course: ideas evolve through argument, modification, and opposition. Hobbes helped detach political legitimacy from divine authority; Locke carried the argument further by limiting government and strengthening the rights of the governed.
Moving from England to France, Enlightenment thinkers approached similar questions from different directions. Voltaire took a more pragmatic approach. He opposed many existing social institutions and was particularly critical of Christianity as an institution of political and social power. Instead, he advocated deism: a divine being might account for the universe’s original “first cause” and supreme intelligence. It also provides a foundation for morality. However, it is not necessarily the God of institutional Christianity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau took a more radical view. He valued freedom above almost everything else and developed the idea of a collective or general will. Yet his conception of freedom contained a tension: if people failed to understand or embrace genuine freedom, they could be “forced to be free.” Such thinking could support mass movements that claimed to embody the “will of the people” and imposed that will on dissenters. The pursuit of collective freedom could thus justify coercion.
Montesquieu added another dimension. He proposed a design principle to preserve liberty and government accountability - what we call "checks and balances" today. He also recognized that political institutions do not arise in a vacuum: they are shaped by a country’s culture, history, and social conditions. At the same time, institutions themselves shape the civilization in which they operate. Montesquieu thus bridges abstract political values and practical institutional design—from asking what values a society should embrace to asking how institutions can preserve them.
Denis Diderot represents yet another aspect of the Enlightenment. By leading the enormous effort to compile the Encyclopédie, he helped organize and disseminate human knowledge. Its significance lay not only in the information it contained but also in its emphasis on knowledge, evidence, factual information, and intellectual inquiry. The project embodied the Enlightenment belief that knowledge should be collected, examined, organized, and made accessible rather than controlled by traditional authorities.
Taken together, these thinkers show why the Enlightenment occupies such a central place in the course. Hobbes questioned the traditional source of political legitimacy; Locke turned the social contract into a defense of individual rights; Voltaire challenged institutional religion and inherited authority; Rousseau elevated freedom and collective political participation; Montesquieu translated ideals into institutional design; and Diderot advanced the dissemination of knowledge. Their ideas differed sharply, but together they helped establish the foundations of modern European political and social thought.
Beyond the Enlightenment treatment, another distinctive feature of the course is its emphasis on the connection between ideas and material conditions. Intellectual movements, political institutions, and social changes are repeatedly traced to underlying economic and social transformations.
The weakening of feudalism, for example, helped liberate agricultural workers, while improvements in agricultural productivity freed, even displaced, labor and resources for the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization, in turn, strengthened science, rationality, technological innovation, and capitalist thought. Throughout the course, political and intellectual movements are similarly linked to workers’ living conditions, fragmented governance, economic change, military defeat, and other social pressures.
The broader lesson is that Western civilization did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Technology and economic change shaped political institutions and philosophical ideas, while ideas in turn reshaped society. By grounding intellectual history in social reality, the course offers a persuasive explanation for why certain ideas emerged when they did and why they attracted followers.
From this perspective, the course’s larger narrative follows two intertwined paths. One is the advance of science and rational thought. Scientific methods and technological innovation helped drive the Industrial Revolution; social contract theory supplied a rational rather than theological basis for political authority; Darwin’s theory of evolution crossed from biology into social and political thought, sometimes dangerously; and utilitarian thinkers tried to organize society rationally around principles of optimization and the maximization of welfare.
The other path is humanitarian. Industrial and economic progress generated enormous wealth, but also severe human costs. Concern for workers, movements toward greater equality, and progressive reforms arose partly in response to the suffering and inequality that accompanied material growth.
Seen this way, rational and material advancement on one side and humanitarian and moral response on the other often moved alternately, like walking with one foot and then the other. Material and technological progress created new possibilities but also new problems; humanitarian and political movements then arose in response. A durable balance between prosperity and humane treatment remained a goal, but one seldom fully achieved.
A further lesson emerges when the course turns to political crisis: prolonged social distress can make radical ideas attractive. The French Revolution followed a long period of political tension, economic hardship, and social inequality, some of them as the aftermath of a long religious conflict. Marxism gained influence amid the brutal exploitation and degrading living conditions of many industrial workers. In Germany after World War I, military defeat, political instability, economic dislocation, and the harsh burdens of the postwar settlement helped create conditions in which Nazism and Hitler could gain mass support.
The implication extends beyond European history. When a group experiences persistent suffering, deprivation, humiliation, or exclusion, the consequences do not stop with that group. Such distress can destabilize the larger political system and increase the appeal of radical movements promising drastic solutions. Concern for disadvantaged groups is therefore not only a matter of compassion; it also affects the security, resilience, and long-term stability of society as a whole.
Precisely because the course presents such a coherent interpretation, it also invites the question of what that interpretation leaves out. It offers a valuable perspective on European history, but not the only one. Several additions would make the picture more comprehensive.
First, greater attention could be given to the evolution of European philosophy itself, especially figures such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Their influence extended far beyond academic philosophy into morality, religion, politics, culture, psychology, and later intellectual movements. A fuller account would examine how such thinkers transformed European understandings of knowledge, morality, freedom, meaning, and human nature.
Second, Europe’s inheritance from ancient Greece and Rome deserves more emphasis. European civilization did not begin with the Enlightenment, nor can its distinctive development be explained entirely by modern social and economic forces. Greek philosophy, Roman law, classical ideas of citizenship and government, and the later rediscovery and reinterpretation of classical traditions all shaped Europe’s intellectual foundations. Social and economic forces mattered greatly, but examining how these inherited traditions influence Europe's journey to modernity would be interesting and insightful.
Third, beyond tracing how particular ideas waxed and waned, it would be useful to ask which values and worldviews endured. These include commitments, however incomplete and historically inconsistent, to certain governing principles and social values. Christianity also profoundly shaped European ideas of morality, human dignity, community, obligation, and social order, even though its institutional and cultural influence has declined in many parts of modern Europe. Comparing these enduring values with those of other civilizations would help clarify what Europeans came to regard as fundamental, what was historically contingent, and what distinguished the European experience.
Fourth, while the course persuasively emphasizes economic and social conditions as forces behind historical change, it should not understate the role of exceptional individuals. Social circumstances may make certain ideas possible or necessary, but great thinkers conceive them and refine them into a form ready for society's consumption. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and others did more than reflect their surroundings. They reframed problems, created new intellectual systems, and gave later generations new ways to understand society. A fuller interpretation should therefore recognize influence in both directions: economic and social forces shape thought, while thought reshapes institutions, economies, and social life.
Finally, the course’s title raises a broader question: civilization encompasses more than political ideas, social movements, economic change, and institutions. European literature, art, architecture, and music also reveal changing views of religion, nature, individuality, society, beauty, suffering, freedom, and human existence. Movements such as the Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism cannot be understood through politics and economics alone.
Studying figures such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt would therefore enrich the course’s account. Their work preserves dimensions of Europe’s values, sensibility, and emotional life that political theory cannot capture, making European history both intellectually important and culturally compelling.
Ultimately, The Development of European Civilization offers a valuable framework for understanding how ideas, institutions, economic conditions, technology, and social movements shaped modern Europe. Its emphasis on the Enlightenment and on the tension between material progress and humanitarian concerns is especially illuminating, even if the course leaves room for deeper treatment of philosophy, religion, classical traditions, and the arts. Rather than a complete account, it is best understood as a compelling interpretive lens—one that shows European civilization as the product of an ongoing interaction among social conditions, intellectual creativity, and human aspirations.
June 5, 2024
An idea focused history of Europe up until WW2.
Done by an eloquent and passionate presenter.
Started out very strong, giving a sense of continuity between the roman client system, and the development of manor style communities after the erosion of the empire. The medieval ages don't get much time, but it's a coherent history, alright. Economic developments are mentioned, as are broad currents in the change of attitudes, and the emergence of new groups of people(those darn middle class city dwellers), that were to be of import later on.
The lectures unsurprisingly shine when it comes to discussing the renaissance, as this is the professors main expertise.
Here we learn fun tidbits like that the diplomatic system, with diplomats and all, originated in the competing city states of Renaissance Italy.
To digress, the lecture course is full of curious facts like these, as I were to find out for example, that the term saboteur comes from ppl throwing their wooden shoes(sabos) into factory machinery to protest and hinder the replacement of their manual labour.
Still, I felt like they take a slight downturn when it comes to the enlightenment. I can't put my finger on it exactly, as it's been a while, but I remember feeling like here the selection seemed more eclectic, still relevant, but a little pulled out of context, and restrung a little loose.
I guess it's only 48 lectures after all, and the task to cover all of European cultural development is more than daunting, and the project inherently very focused on ideas, up to a fault perhaps. Tho here I recommend supplementing the course with "The foundations of western civilization II" by Robert Buchholz as it is more classically historically focused. i.e. more credence is given to material realities, and political events, rather than lofty things like intellectual trends, and the self consciousnesses of nations(tho in both cases a good balance is struck)
In any case, the series caught itself again from the small stumbling.
The industrialization, and the multiple ways aristocratic and boregoise society, the church, as well as the workers themselves reacted to it was covered very powerfully. At no point did the course feel disjointed here, and the turn into the 20th century made sense, and envoked such a vivid picture, that my mood took a bad downturn when the narration of WW1 commenced...
All in all:
I learned a lot, up to the very end,
and it reinforced my belief that sometimes one of the best things one can do is to listen to an excellent historian, like Bartlett, and learn about how the world came to be as it is today.
If not for it's own sake, and the amazing stories that are to be experienced, then for how this makes everything you learn about events, people, ideas, books, situated in or out of said historic happenstance make more sense.
Done by an eloquent and passionate presenter.
Started out very strong, giving a sense of continuity between the roman client system, and the development of manor style communities after the erosion of the empire. The medieval ages don't get much time, but it's a coherent history, alright. Economic developments are mentioned, as are broad currents in the change of attitudes, and the emergence of new groups of people(those darn middle class city dwellers), that were to be of import later on.
The lectures unsurprisingly shine when it comes to discussing the renaissance, as this is the professors main expertise.
Here we learn fun tidbits like that the diplomatic system, with diplomats and all, originated in the competing city states of Renaissance Italy.
To digress, the lecture course is full of curious facts like these, as I were to find out for example, that the term saboteur comes from ppl throwing their wooden shoes(sabos) into factory machinery to protest and hinder the replacement of their manual labour.
Still, I felt like they take a slight downturn when it comes to the enlightenment. I can't put my finger on it exactly, as it's been a while, but I remember feeling like here the selection seemed more eclectic, still relevant, but a little pulled out of context, and restrung a little loose.
I guess it's only 48 lectures after all, and the task to cover all of European cultural development is more than daunting, and the project inherently very focused on ideas, up to a fault perhaps. Tho here I recommend supplementing the course with "The foundations of western civilization II" by Robert Buchholz as it is more classically historically focused. i.e. more credence is given to material realities, and political events, rather than lofty things like intellectual trends, and the self consciousnesses of nations(tho in both cases a good balance is struck)
In any case, the series caught itself again from the small stumbling.
The industrialization, and the multiple ways aristocratic and boregoise society, the church, as well as the workers themselves reacted to it was covered very powerfully. At no point did the course feel disjointed here, and the turn into the 20th century made sense, and envoked such a vivid picture, that my mood took a bad downturn when the narration of WW1 commenced...
All in all:
I learned a lot, up to the very end,
and it reinforced my belief that sometimes one of the best things one can do is to listen to an excellent historian, like Bartlett, and learn about how the world came to be as it is today.
If not for it's own sake, and the amazing stories that are to be experienced, then for how this makes everything you learn about events, people, ideas, books, situated in or out of said historic happenstance make more sense.
December 17, 2020
Very good lecture series. Some of it was not my first time hearing this info, but a lot of it was. While I was expecting to get most of my wealth from what was taught about the Middle Ages, I actually had covered nearly all of it from other Great Courses history lectures and other sources. The gem of this book is what it covers from the late 19th century onward. I never previously understood just how fundamentally the Dreyfus Affair (which I only know through the film "The Life of Emile Zola") changed France even to this day. It dissects the state of affairs that not only led to WWI, but really dives into what nations other than Germany were going through between the wars. Ironically, this 48-part lecture series predates Brexit, so I wonder what conclusions Professor Bartlett might now reach in a 49th lecture.
July 14, 2022
A solid look at European history from the Middle Ages to WWII. While covering a long time period and a wide range of themes, it remains largely focussed on Central Europe and Britain, with the occasional look at Russia, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Apart from bringing up Sweden in a single lecture in connection to the 30 Years' War, anything north of Germany might as well not exist for the purposes of this lecture series... but sadly, that rather frequently tends to be the case with "European" history. A lot of interesting stuff, but I also found my attention wandering on various occasions. The lecturer's style could have been more engaging.
March 27, 2024
Great course. Highly recommend.
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June 19, 2024Excellent detailed introduction to European history from the fall of the Roman Empire through World War II. Serves as a great refresher for important European events and people.
January 19, 2026
This book is enlightening and fairly entertaining. It's such a vast topic that it seems to move relatively fast despite its length.
November 25, 2016
Easily the best of the great courses I've listened to. As with all of these courses it covered a big picture view of 100s of years of Europe in 1/2 hour lectures. Each of these lectures could have been (and are) entire courses in themselves. WWII for example is just one 1/2 hour lecture. This would be a great course to listen to early in high school to understand how various issues fit together, the fall of Rome, feudalism, the catholic church, the Reformation, the crusades, the renaissance, the rise of banking, the industrial revolution. A must if you're about to visit anywhere in Europe. You'll add a lot to your hit list of things to visit and read about.
October 10, 2014
I usually don't give 5 stars, but this was an excellent course!
January 17, 2016
Not my favorite Great Courses offering, though the content is very interesting and comprehensive. The lecturer left something to be desired, in my opinion. Not anything bad, but just not my favorite.
July 16, 2018
This course stands out because it takes a perspective of following power and resources. the history makes more sense. Today's politics also makes more sense because now, I "follow the money".
This book and the hardcore history podcast got me interested in history.
This book and the hardcore history podcast got me interested in history.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews