The historical sketches and fragments that are here submitted to the reader deal only with a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period known as the Middle Ages and are intended to arouse a wider interest in that thousand years of Christian history that opens with Clovis and closes with the discovery of the New World. Both in Church and State the life of today is rooted in those ten marvelous centuries of transition, during which the Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines of our history are not intelligible apart from a sufficient understanding of what men thought, hoped, attempted, suffered and founded in the days when there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to Drontheim. The problems that now agitate us and seem to threaten our inherited social order were problems for the medieval man. The conflicts and difficulties that make up the sum of political history for the last five centuries are only the last chapters of a story of surpassing interest that opens with the formal establishment of Christian thought as the basis and norm of social existence and development. The titles of the essays are : "Gregory the Great and the Barbarian World", "Justinian the Great", "The Religion of Islam", "Catholicism in the Middle Ages", "The Christians of St. Thomas", "The Medieval Teacher", "The Book of a Medieval Mother", "German Schools in the Sixteenth Century", "Baths and Bathing in the Middle Ages", "Clergy and People in Medieval England", "The Cathedral Builders of Mediaeval Europe", "The Results of the Crusades on the Italian Renaissance."
