Summa Theologica
1274 · 432 pages
Aquinas asks thousands of questions about God, law, virtue, and sin, and answers each only after stating the strongest case against himself. Catholic thought has been arguing with him for 750 years.
★ 7.4
Browse by time · century
13th century
1201 – 1300
Showing 6 books from the 13th century
The Essential Rumi
1273 · 302 pages
Grief for a wandering dervish named Shams turned Rumi into a poet of longing for God. His great Masnavi opens with a reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from.
★ 7.4
The Prose Edda
1220 · 180 pages
A Swedish king walks into a hall and asks three strangers how the world began and how it ends. Their answers are nearly all anyone now knows about Thor, Loki, and Ragnarok.
★ 7.3
Hojoki
1212 · 109 pages
Writing from a hut ten feet square, a Kyoto recluse recalls the fire, whirlwind, famine, and earthquake that destroyed the capital, and concludes that nothing built by people is meant to stay.
★ 7.0
The Travels of Marco Polo
1290 · 379 pages
Seventeen years at Kublai Khan's court, and Polo comes back describing paper money, black stones that burn, and cities richer than anything in Europe. Columbus annotated his copy and went looking for them.
★ 6.7
The Romance of the Rose
1275 · 350 pages
Courtly love as siege warfare: a dreamer enters a garden, and Jean de Meun's vast continuation spends twenty thousand lines besieging one rosebud. Christine de Pizan's attack on it started a centuries-long argument.
★ 6.5