“Friedrich Heer's The Medieval World is learned, very wide in scope, and exciting in its boldness. Not a narrative but a survey of the main elements of the life and culture of the high Middle Ages, its describes its varied scene with a richness no narrative could attain.”
-Anthony Quinton

In 1100, Europe was open in boundaries, faith and outlook. By the middle of the fourteenth century, it had been “closed” – by the Mongol and Turkish invasions, the rift with Byzantium, and the intolerant dogmatism of the Church.
Friedrich Heer's tour de force of scholarship and originality re-creates that world: in the daily lives of aristocrats and peasants, town-dwellers and country-fold; the growth of serfdom and the flowering of chivalry; the roles of cleric and courtier, painter, king and philosopher. In it, we can see our own world in embryo.


Friedrich Heer was educated at Academic High School in Vienna. A left-wing Catholic and one of the earliest supporters of liberal resistance movements behind the Iron Curtain, he was also publisher of New Forum. In 1961, he became chief dramaturg at the Vienna Burgtheater. His three-volume history of “the spirit of Europe,” The Beginnings of Europe, established him as a historian and cultural critic.