THIS BOOK BEGAN WITH A ABout how "intellectual history" is simply a history of human thought, not the thought of elites but the thought of ordinary human beings. In the preceding pages, we have had occasion to meet a wide variety of people, only a few of whom were kings or high-ranking nobles. I have been concerned in these pages to present brief pictures of a wide variety of people. Some of the chief arguments with which I have been concerned, however, probably have fallen through the cracks, or have remained unnoticed, so let me reiterate them here. In the first few chapters ("Silver Bullet