Modern culture wars and the retrospective shaping of Europe’s past.  The first half of this episode deals with the exaggerations and distortions which beset our common understandings of the past - among them the concepts of the ‘Dark Ages’, of ‘Byzantium’, of the Renaissance and its claimed causation by Islamic thought. The second part details some aspects of what has been termed ‘The 12th Century Renaissance’- economic and social change, the Cistercian monastic Order, the formation of the universities, the flourishing of Troubadour poetry and chivalric culture, and the emergence and spread of the ‘Gothic’ style.