Thomas Cahill - Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World

Writers at Wright presents an evening with bestselling historian Thomas Cahill as he discusses his new book, Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World.

In Volume VI of his acclaimed Hinges of History series, Thomas Cahill guides us through the thrilling period of Renaissance and Reformation (late fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries), so full of innovation and cultural change that the Western world would not experience its like again until the twentieth century. Beginning with the continent-wide disaster of the Black Plague, Cahill traces the many innovations in European thought and experience that served both the new humanism of the Renaissance and the seemingly abrupt religious alterations of the increasingly radical Reformation. This is an age of the most sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies, and of newly found courage, as many thousands refuse to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. It is an era of newly discovered continents and previously unknown peoples. More than anything, it is a time of individuality in which a whole culture must achieve a new balance, if the West is to continue.

Thomas Cahill's appealing approach to distant history has won the attention of millions of readers in North America and beyond. Cahill is the author of five volumes in the Hinges of History series: How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gifts of the Jews, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, and Mysteries of the Middle Ages. They have been bestsellers, not only in the United States but also in countries ranging from Italy to Brazil. He and his wife, Susan, also a writer, divide their time between New York City and Rome.

This will be a ticketed event. ADMISSION $10. Each ticket can be redeemed for $10 off the cover price of Heretics and Heroes on the night of the event.

10% of all book sales at this event will be donated to The Unity Temple Restoration Foundation.

Writers at Wright is a partnership between The Book Table, Friends of the Oak Park Public Library, Midwest Media and Unity Temple Restoration Foundationdedicated to bringing the finest authors to speak at Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece, Unity Temple in Oak Park, IL.