In 1100 Europe was open in boundaries, faith and outlook. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was 'closed'-by Mongol and Turkish invasions, by the rift with Byzantium, by the intolerant dogmatism of the Church. Friedrich Heer's tour de force of scholarship and originality recreates that world: the daily life of aristocrats and peasants, town-dwellers and countryfolk; the growth of serfdom and the flowering of chivalry; the roles of cleric and courtier, painter and poet, king and philosopher. In it we can see our own world in embryo. As Professor Heer writes: 'History is the present, the present is history'.