Book excerpt: Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. This book focuses on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. The reader travels from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, from the Nile to the Volga, from north Africa to the central Asia, until finally ending in the Americas. Through a focus on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Beatrice's Last Smile is a history of holiness which includes Judaism and the revelations of Muhammad. The narrative moves from the violence within fifth-century Britain and Gaul to the Hundred Years War between England and France, from the plague of the sixth century to the Black Death of the fourteenth, from the first crusaders sacking Jerusalem to the Spanish capturing Tenochtitlán, from Viking raids to Mongol invasions, from the inquisitons into heresy to the trials of witches, from a third-century Christian mother dying in a Roman arena to the immolation of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth, from an ancient universe without heaven and hell to a medieval cosmos with a fiery inferno and a shimmering paradise. Over these centuries there is an emphasis on individual men and women and their stories woven together with the story of the emergence of a distinctive western culture.