After the success of the Knights of Columbus edition of the Popes and Science of which 40,000 were issued it gives me great pleasure to accede to the request of the Supreme Officers of the Order to permit them to issue a correspondingly large edition of the present volume. The good work which the Knights of Columbus have thus done in diffusing a knowledge of the true relations of the Church to science,--generous patronage and encouragement, instead of supposed opposition,--will, I think, be greatly furthered by the wide distribution of the information contained in this volume with regard to the supremely helpful attitude of the Church towards art and architecture, literature, education and above all the important social problems, which is so well illustrated during the great period of the Thirteenth Century. I sincerely hope that brother Knights of Columbus will find in the book some of that renewal of devotion to Mother Church that came as the result of my own studies of this glorious period of her history, when her action was untrammelled by political considerations and when she was free to express herself in every great movement for the benefit of humanity. Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1912. {xi} FREDERIC HARRISON, MACAULAY, FREEMAN, AND FISKE ON THE PLACE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN HISTORY Of all the epochs of effort after a new life, that of the age of Aquinas, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto, and Dante is the most purely spiritual, the most really constructive, and indeed the most truly philosophic. . . . The whole thirteenth century is crowded with creative forces in philosophy, art, poetry, and statesmanship as rich as those of the humanist _Renaissance_. And if we are accustomed to look on them as so much more limited and rude it is because we forget how very few and poor were their resources and their instruments. In creative genius Giotto is the peer, if not the superior of Raphael. Dante had all the qualities of his three chief successors and very much more besides. It is a tenable view that in inventive fertility and in imaginative range, those vast composite creations--the Cathedrals of the Thirteenth Century, in all their wealth of architectural statuary, painted glass, enamels, embroideries, and inexhaustible decorative work may be set beside the entire painting of the sixteenth century. Albert and Aquinas, in philosophic range, had no peer until we come down to Descartes, nor was Roger Bacon surpassed in versatile audacity of genius and in true encyclopaedic grasp by any thinker between him and his namesake the Chancellor. In statesmanship and all the qualities of the born leader of men we can only match the great chiefs of the Thirteenth Century by comparing them with the greatest names three or even four centuries later.