The Renaissance - The World Awakes

My oldest student is doing her study of the Middle Ages using the wonderful book The World of Walls: The Middle Ages in Western Europe by Polly Schoyer Brooks and Nancy Zinsser Walworth. This out of print and hard-to-find book contains biographies of the following key historical figures:

Gregory the Great (born 540)

Charlemagne (born 742)

William the Conqueror (born 1027)

Eleanor of Aquitaine (born 1122)

Richard the Lion Heart (born 1157)

Francis of Assisi (born 1182)

Simon de Montfort (born 1208)

Geoffey Chaucer (born 1343)

Today we learned about the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings. In addition to the chapter from The World of Walls, we also used Hastings (Great Battles and Sieges) by Philip Sauvain. For a fun follow-up assignment idea, I recommend my Dec 2016 blog post The Norman Conquest - "Breaking Battle".

The Bayeux Tapestry: Complete Reproduction
amazing fold-out book

Note: The Eleanor of Aquitaine chapter is so well regarded that it has actually been released as a paperback book on its own, Queen Eleanor: Independent Spirit of the Medieval World.

Polly Schoyer Brooks and Nancy Zinsser Walworth wrote two other books, one on each side of The World of Walls. The one that comes before it is called When the World Was Rome and the one that comes after it is called The World Awakes: The Renaissance in Western Europe.

Here is a list of Renaissance biographies included in The World Awakes:

Italy Awakes
Lorenzo dé Medici (born 1449)
Leonardo da Vinci (born 1452)

Spain Awakes
Ferdinand (born 1452) and Isabella (born 1451)
Christopher Columbus (born 1451)

France Awakes
Francis I (born 1494)
Francis Rabelais (born 1494)

England Awakes
Elizabeth I (1533)
William Shakespeare (1564)

Although the out-of-print books can be expensive and hard to track down, I recommend getting them if your child likes long, detailed, and beautifully written biographies of interesting historical figures. I also just discovered that all three books in this series are available to borrow digitally for free at archive.org!

When the World Was Rome

The World of Walls

The World Awakes

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