World at First Light

A magisterial history of the Renaissance and the birth of the modern world

The cultural epoch we know as the Renaissance emerged at a certain time and in a certain place. Why then and not earlier? Why there and not elsewhere? In The World at First Light, historian Bernd Roeck explores the cultural and historical preconditions that enabled the European Renaissance. Roeck shows that the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, including the science of the medieval Arab world, played a critical role in shaping the beginnings of Western modernity. He explains that the Renaissance emerged in a part of Europe where competing states and cities formed relatively open societies. Most of the era’s creative minds—from Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to Copernicus and Galileo—came from the middle classes. The art of arguing flowered, the basso continuo to intellectual and cultural breakthroughs.

Roeck argues that two revolutions shaped the Renaissance: a media revolution, triggered by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type—which itself was a driving force behind the scientific revolution—and the advent of modern science. He also reports on the dark side of the era—hatred of Jews, witch panic, religious wars, and the atrocities of colonialism. In a series of meditative counterfactuals, Roeck considers other cultural rebirths throughout the first millennium, from the Islamic empire to the Carolingians, examining why the epic developments of the Renaissance took place in the West and not elsewhere. The complicated legacy of the Renaissance, he shows, encompasses the art of critical thinking as learned from the ancients, the emergence of the modern state, and the genesis of democracy.