Heretics and Heroes

How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World

By: Thomas Cahill

Narrated by: Thomas Cahill

From the inimitable bestselling author Thomas Cahill, another popular history—this one focusing on how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. A truly revolutionary book.

In Volume VI of his acclaimed Hinges of History series, Thomas Cahill guides us through the thrilling period of the Renaissance and the Reformation (the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth century), so full of innovation and cultural change that the Western world would not experience its like again until the twentieth century. Beginning with the continent-wide disaster of the Black Death, Cahill traces the many developments in European thought and experience that served both the new humanism of the Renaissance and the seemingly abrupt religious alterations of the increasingly radical Reformation. This is an age of the most sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies and of newly found courage, as many thousands refuse to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. It is an era of just-discovered continents and previously unknown peoples. More than anything, it is a time of individuality in which a whole culture must achieve a new balance if the West is to continue.

Renaissance History from a Different Perspective

What made the experience of listening to Heretics and Heroes the most enjoyable?

Thomas Cahill weaves many threads together to create an interesting story -- adding depth to a period of history and helping to understand the people, personalities and motivations of the time.

Have you listened to any of Thomas Cahill’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

A Gem

A GEM!
Readable
Understandable
Illuminating
Shows how the past has influenced our president.
Will look for more by this author.

Too much revisionism & propaganda

There are some brilliant descriptions and passages, but a few recurring revisionist lapses and heavy handed propaganda make the course a miserable slog. Too bad. At first, it could have been ignorance, then it became clear Thomas had several broken axes to grind.

A Wonderful Read

This book is more like an essay than a history. It is magnificent. His description and meditation on Luther is fabulous and enlightening. The prose regarding the Renaissance artists is inspiring. A large breadth of topics is touched upon with equal passion. This is not a book for historians; it is a book for the rest of us.

Rata Tat Tat on That Reformation

There are enough interesting happenings to learn here to make this a worthwhile experience. Yet, I have now read all the Thomas Cahill publications. For the most part, they are all difficult to put down, easy to praise, and fun reads. Unfortunately, Heretics and Heroes, How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World, written and read by Thomas Cahill, just does not come across with the same pizzaz. Readable but, that’s it just readable. The very interesting historical facts are displayed in a Rata Tat Tat style, often leaving the reader discombobulated as to what is the topic being discussed. If you have a choice to read one of the earlier works, then get to this one later in your readings