Chances are, if asked about life in the Middle Ages, one might describe a landscape from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with mud-covered peasants throwing not-quite-dead relatives into plague carts. And if asked about medieval science, one might simply ask, “What’s that?” However, in The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, Cambridge historian and lecturer Seb Falk reveals how far from reality these perceptions are.

Instead of smothering science, Falk argues, the church actually nurtured it during the Middle Ages. Observance of daily devotions and holy days required accurate methods for measuring time, which required sophisticated mathematical skills and precise astronomical observation. Astrolabes and other beautiful scientific instruments originally developed to tell time were found to be useful in other fields as well, triggering advances in optics, navigation and medicine. Friars, monks and priests went to universities, where, in addition to theology, they learned about scientific and mathematical advances developed by Islamic scholars. The medieval scholar was a member of an international society devoted to the precise understanding of creation, not a benighted isolationist.

In The Light Ages, Falk uses the story of John Westwyk, a 14th-century monk-mathematician-astronomer-warrior, to explore the scientific explosion that occurred well before the Renaissance. Westwyk, an almost anonymous brother in the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans, serves as the reader’s guide to the intellectual world of medieval Europe. This ordinary monk shows up in the most extraordinary places: the University of Oxford, Chaucer’s London and even the middle of a doomed crusade. A talented mathematician and astronomer, Westwyk refined the measurements necessary to locate exactly where a planet was on any given day in its revolution around the earth. Ironically, this increased precision necessitated evermore elaborate and unlikely explanations for the glaring discrepancies between the geocentric theory of the universe and observed reality.

The work of these early scientists revealed that the universe couldn’t revolve around the earth. Without their work, Copernicus’ calculations would have been neither possible nor necessary. In this magisterial and informative book, Falk makes a convincing argument that The Light Ages gave birth to our own age.

When the western part of the former Third Reich transformed itself with lightning speed into a stable democratic republic and economic powerhouse, it was the ultimate post-World War II success story. The story is true enough, but it wasn't quite that simple. In fact, the defeated German people were shattered after the war. Countless thousands were refugees, prisoners of war and rape victims, collectively blamed for the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, these conditions caused widespread tension, illness, emotional breakdown and deep denial.

They also caused a now-forgotten witch panic. Historian Monica Black surfaces this deeply buried episode in her riveting A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany, which explores the connection between Germany’s trauma and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria. Included in this wave were Germans who accused their neighbors of being witches, a charismatic faith healer named Bruno Gröning who attracted thousands of followers and others who reported sightings of the Virgin Mary.

From 1947 to 1956, there were 77 “witchcraft” trials in Germany. To be clear, these were not trials of witches; they were cases brought by people accused of witchcraft against their accusers. (The word “witch” was seldom used; the accusers called them “evil people.”) The most notorious trial involved Waldemar Eberling, a lay healer and exorcist who told clients they had been bewitched by neighbors. He was called Hexenbanner, "witch banisher," and both he and his nemesis, a retired teacher who crusaded for the accused, had been anti-Nazis.

Black focuses much of the book on Gröning, a former Nazi believed by his legion of followers to possess magic healing powers against illnesses caused by evil. He eventually went to trial in a tragic case involving a teenage girl with tuberculosis who stopped medical treatment because of her faith in him.

All these cases were studied by doctors at the time they occurred, but Black perceptively points out that none of them ever publicly faced up to the heart of the matter. The terrible societal conditions that led to this outbreak, the experts said, was the fault of the Allied occupation. Guilt and shame over Nazi crimes were never mentioned. Only Eberling’s teacher-enemy pointed out—privately—that a hunt for “witches” was not unlike blaming the Jews.

When World War II ended, Europe was devastated. There were over 40 million displaced people across the continent, including 8 million civilians in Germany alone, 10% of them Jewish. Malaria, tuberculosis and famine were serious threats in areas that lacked a stable society, moral authority and basic infrastructure. In his wide-ranging and consistently enlightening Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II, Paul Betts shows how efforts to “civilize” these devastated regions influenced much of our world today. His account combines political, cultural and intellectual history, while also touching on science, religion, photography, architecture and archaeology.

The first humanitarian efforts were waged by foreign volunteers from both secular and religious groups. Among the many agencies was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, made up of workers from 44 countries. They offered help to the “victims of German and Japanese barbarism,” and their legacy is mixed, but the organization “did forge a new language of civilization . . . for postwar Europe.”

Other types of aid had religious overtones. In 1946 Winston Churchill asserted that there “can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.” His message of forgiveness went as far as a personal contribution to the defense fund for German officers accused of war crimes. Likewise, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower shaped a good deal of U.S. foreign policy according to their Christian beliefs.

The first half of the book focuses on the European continent, and the second half concentrates on Europe’s changing role in the wider world with regard to empire and decolonization. In all, this splendid overview provides striking new insights about where the Western world has been and where we may be going.

Although it’s been 75 years since the end of World War II, accounts that reveal the resilience of ordinary individuals in the face of the Nazi regime continue to emerge into the historical record. In Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, Jeffrey H. Jackson, a Rhodes College professor specializing in European history, unearths the fascinating story of two women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, whose “resistance activity grew organically out of life-long patterns of fighting against the social norms of their day.”

After 20 years of immersion in the art scene of Paris, Lucy, a photographer and writer who published under the name Claude Cahun, and Suzanne, an illustrator whose professional pseudonym was Marcel Moore, found themselves under German occupation on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. The two women had retreated there in 1937 out of concern for Lucy’s chronic health problems, posing as sisters to hide their true relationship.

Jackson links the women’s involvement in resistance work to their personal experiences as artists and lesbians whose lives constantly put them at odds with expectations placed on them as the daughters of wealthy families in France. These expectations included gender identity and expression, which they explored in both their personal lives and art as a fluid spectrum between masculinity, androgyny and femininity. Jackson’s previous works include Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris, and he is adept at bringing the vibrancy of 1920s and 1930s Paris to life, including the cafes, nightclubs and personalities that were part of the thriving gay and lesbian community to which Lucy and Suzanne belonged.

This carefully researched volume also includes fascinating photographs, artwork and excerpts from the women’s letters and articles. The author’s attention to detail and prodigious research skills are also on display as he recounts the saga of the German occupation of Jersey and the women’s growing determination to do something to resist.

They began small enough, ripping down German posters and announcements and making graffiti. They also created their own anti-Nazi artwork and slipped subversive messages (the eponymous “paper bullets”) onto the windshields of police cars or into the pages of German-language magazines on local newsstands. Their efforts at fomenting doubt among the occupying forces escalated, eventually leading to their arrest, imprisonment in solitary confinement and a dramatic trial in which they were sentenced to death in November of 1944. Their sentence was later commuted, but they remained confined until the war ended.

The final section of Paper Bullets details these women's postwar lives. Lucy died in 1954, Suzanne in 1972. In an epilogue entitled “Why Resist?” Jackson addresses some of the issues that led to the women’s commitment to the cause of freedom. Their story, he notes, “invites us to look at a history of the war from the bottom up, to think about the complexities of ground-level responses to conquest.” Impeccably researched and meticulously sourced, Paper Bullets is a welcome and timely portrait of courage and creativity.