The mid-fifteenth-century writers treated Islam as an urgent practical problem, not a cosmic role

Evidence

The writers of this period, by a great effort, had made themselves masters of the knowledge of the thirteenth century; and to this they added the wider experience and capacity for self-criticism of the fourteenth. They saw the full complexity of the problem, and they saw it as an urgent reality that required an answer. They eschewed grandiose attempts to give Islam a distinct role in world history. But, at the other end of the scale, they were all determined to cut through trivialities and unnecessary detail, and get to the central issues. They differed widely about the goal to be reached and the way to reach it, but they tried to be simple, comprehensive, and effective. In the mere fact that they differed they show an advance on their predecessors; and despite their differences they agree in this: they appealed to practical reason and common sense rather than to refined and unsubstantial speculations. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 562

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from grand apocalyptic schemes to practical reasoning parallels the general intellectual move from speculative to pragmatic thinking.

Related

• Mid-fifteenth-century European thought on Islam surpassed all earlier and later centuries (similarity 0.84)
• Islam posed the most far-reaching problem medieval Christendom faced (similarity 0.82)
• Islam menaced Europe more in 1600 yet mattered less intellectually than in 1000 (similarity 0.80)
• Bacon abandoned biblical prophecy to read Islam through philosophy (similarity 0.79)
• The Western canon of Islam was fixed by the mid-fourteenth century (similarity 0.79)
• An introspective self-critical turn marked a new era in Christian thought about Islam (similarity 0.79)
• European intellectual confrontation with Islam began in the twelfth century (similarity 0.78)