Medieval

Seven hundred years, from the fall of Rome to the Black Death, and a shelf that is smaller than its era because the programs pick from it carefully. The centre is the thirteenth century, when the universities were founded and Aristotle was recovered from the Arabic. Aquinas’s Summa is the summit: a complete account of God, creation, ethics and law in the form of questions and answers, and the book Thomas Aquinas College spends two years on. Anselm, two centuries earlier, had proved God’s existence in a single argument that is still being debated.

The Islamic and Jewish philosophers who transmitted Aristotle are here too: Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, and Ibn Tufayl, whose Hayy ibn Yaqzan is a philosophical novel about a boy raised by a gazelle on a desert island who reasons his way to God. The Song of Roland and Beowulf are the epics of the warrior north.

Then Dante and Chaucer, who ended the era by writing in the languages people spoke. The Divine Comedy is the medieval synthesis as a journey, every doctrine of Aquinas turned into a person met on the road. The Canterbury Tales is the same world seen from an inn, with the pilgrims telling stories that are as often bawdy as holy. Start with the Inferno, which is where every reader starts.