The Journey to Wisdom addresses a broad array of topics in education, the natural world, and medieval intellectual history. The book examines a philosophy of education that originated with the ancient Greeks and that reached its culmination in the late-medieval and early-Renaissance periods.

That philosophy of education promotes a journey to wisdom, involving an escape from pure subjectivity and "the seductions of rhetoric" and leading to a profound awareness of the natural world and "nature's God." It grants us a renewed sense of education as a self-directed, transforming journey to knowledge and insight - rather than (as is so often the case now) as an impersonal, bureaucratized trek that reflects little sense of the ultimate aims of education.

The Journey of Wisdom will be essential reading for students of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance intellectual history. But in its unmistakably modern concerns about education, the book also speaks to a far wider spectrum of readers.