William Manchester, A
World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval World and the Renaissance: Portrait of an
Age
Copyright © 1992, 1993 William Manchester
Little, Brown and Company (paperback reprint)
ISBN 0-316-54556-2
William Manchester was not an historian of the period (roughly,
500 A.D. to 1520 A.D.) or the place
(Europe); he is, by training and interest, an historian of the 20th
century, and, mostly, of America (William
Manchester - Wikipedia). He was, obviously,
very much interested in this particular time period, and (at least for me, as
an interested reader) he has written a mostly engaging book.
The book comes in three parts. The first is a brief (28 pages) summary of
what a late medieval community looked like.
He perhaps over-generalizes, but this does set the scene well. The core of the book (190 pages) is the
splintering of Christianity (with emphasis on the corruption of Rome and the
role of Martin Luther in). He does this
very well, and I found this section to be of great interest. He is also more sympathetic to Henry VIII
than many historians
The final section (75 pages) deals with Ferdinand Magellan’s
voyage which ultimately provided irrefutable evidence that this planet is a
sphere. His description of the voyage is
riveting. But in the end of this third part that things fall apart. The final few pages are a paean to Magellan that
seems more than a bit over the top.
Magellan’s voyage was a remarkable achievement (which he did not live to
see concluded), but the voyage itself seems to me to have been inevitable. And the part of the voyage that, for
Magellan, ended in his death while attempting to coerce the inhabitants of what
we know as the Philippians, seems to be seen, by Manchester as a tribute to
Magellan’s beliefs. Whereas I see it as
an amazingly maladroit act of hubris.
But the demonstration that our planet was one of many planets moving was,
as Manchester concludes, the final end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of
the “modern” age.
No comments:
Post a Comment