Aristotle's Children

In the late Middle Ages an intellectual explosion transformed Europe and coursed through the Western world, triggering student riots and heresy trials and setting the stage for today's rift between reason and religion. The ideas came from Aristotle. His work, like the rest of Greek culture, had been lost in the centuries after the fall of Rome. But in the Muslim world, the wisdom of the Greeks was never lost and contributed to the flowering of Islamic culture. When scholars in the twelfth century collaborated on translating the ancient classics, they resurrected ideas that sparked fierce controversies in the universities and caused major changes in the Catholic Church. Rubenstein shows how the Church struggled to reconcile science and religion and how Western thinking was set on the path it has followed ever since.