Beatrice's Last Smile : : a new History of the Middle Ages

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What God? (203-337) -- Swansongs (337-476) -- The flutter of blackbirds (440-613) -- Mad poets (597-735) -- An everlasting star in the west (722-824) -- The harrying of the heathen (825-972) -- Hermits in mail (972-1099) -- Uncle, what troubles you? (1099-1220) -- Love moves the sun and stars (1209-1321) -- Only death wakes us from dreaming (1321-1431).
Mark Gregory Pegg's history of the Middle Ages opens and closes with martyrdom, the first that of a young Roman mother in a North African amphitheater in 203 and the second a French girl burned to death beside the Seine in 1431. Together, they take readers from the vastness of the Roman Empire to small communities between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, from the nomads of the Asian steppes to the triumphant Church of Latin Christendom. Beatrice's Last Smile offers a pulsating history of the West: the passionate belief in the old gods that yields to a cosmos shaped by one; the transition from a penitential culture to a confessional one; the universal obsession with imitating Christ. The book is named for the moment in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy when his long-dead love, Beatrice, smiles one final time at Dante in paradise before turning away to look eternally upon the face of God. Mark Gregory Pegg's epic narrative captures a millennium within that fleeting smile, in ways that modern readers will find illuminating and haunting.

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