W. Robert Godfrey

And if I succeed, it'll be a miracle.

But that's what we're aiming at together.

Now, history is not easy to outline, but outlines are very helpful.

And so I have a rough, not very scholarly outline for what we're going to do together.

The first four lectures are going to be called warming up.

That's a technical historian's phrase, warming up.

We're going to be looking roughly at the period 500 to 1100.

to see how various forces inherited from the ancient world are shaped and directed towards the characteristic form of medieval life and thought and history.

So, warming up, section one, first four lectures, about 500 to about 1100.

And then,

The second part I'm calling the wondrous century, the kind of high point in some ways of the Middle Ages, 1100 to 1200.

And there we'll be able to slow down a little bit, look in a little more detail at some of the really critical things going on there in that remarkable century.

I'll cheat a little bit.

I'll start a little before 1100, go a little past 1200, but it's a century for government work.

And then the third part will be called working it out.

We're going to look at the implications of what was accomplished in that wondrous century and how it moved on towards the end of the Middle Ages, looking at the period of about 1200 to 1500.

And in each of those three sections, I'm going to subdivide the section into two main parts.

One part I'm calling church and society, where we'll look a little bit more at politics, at institutions, at the response of people in the churches.

We might call that the more church history side of what we're doing.

And then the other section I'm going to call Paths to God.