Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

But I hope that this, along with the chapters that have gone before, should be sufficient for us to see that by the 1530s, the western world was no longer recognizably medieval. The rise of the printed word, encounters with the New World, the collapse and fracture of the church militant, the demographic rearrangements caused by waves of the Black Death, the humanistic and artistic revolutions of the Renaissance—all these things and more had recast the shape and feel of the west, in ways that contemporaries explicitly recognized, even as the process was taking place. The Middle Ages did not exactly die on the streets of Rome in 1527—but afterward, it was very clear that something had been lost and was never coming back.