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194 of 228 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
European history as tabloid cover story, July 31, 2001
This review is from: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age (Paperback)
Having enjoyed William Manchester's works in the past, and being interested in the material supposedly covered in this book, I was prepared to enjoy A World Lit Only by Fire when I sat down with it. But, as much as I would have liked to, I couldn't. Manchester states that he's no expert on the period, and neither am I, but even I could see the glaring and seemingly endless number of factual errors throughout the book, not to mention the myths (such as that of "la belle Ferroniere" and Francis I) he presents as fact. The book isn't really even about the Middle Ages, aside from twenty or so pages Manchester devotes to outlining that thousand years of European history. The majority of the book is dedicated to Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe, and a sizable chunk of that is solely concerned with the career of Magellan. This would be acceptable, of course, if Manchester's "history" wasn't just a rehash of 19th (!) century clichés and stereotypes about the Middle Ages: that is, a Europe composed wholly of mud, blood, sex, torture and ridiculous superstition, utterly worthless and depraved. And although I'm certainly not a fan of the Catholic Church, Manchester's endless cavalcade of largely unsubstantiated potshots at that institution is particularly annoying. If this book was someone's sole source of information on the time period, they'd be excused for thinking that Europe from the fall of Rome to the rediscovery of Classical culture in the Renaissance was pretty much composed of people expiring from sexually transmitted diseases... when they weren't poisoning popes and burning witches, that is. So, why two stars and not one? A World Lit Only by Fire may be tabloid history, but it could be considered a guilty pleasure if you keep in mind that it's utter nonsense. The portion of the book dedicated to Magellan is also a cut above the rest. Given that the majority of readers will probably be utterly ignorant about this time period, though, it's pretty irresponsible of Manchester to present a bunch of unrelated half-truths and myths as history. He says in his Author's Note--along with various other veiled apologies--that he didn't plan out the writing of this book in advance and it certainly shows. If you want to read about the time period covered in this book without sacrificing facts for readability (or vice versa), try A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, the appropriate volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant (The Age of Faith, The Renaissance, and The Reformation) or The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor. They show that reading about this period can be both entertaining and informative, even if there isn't a bloodthirsty, syphilitic twelve year-old bishop on every page.
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A book lit only by fame, May 22, 2008
This review is from: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age (Paperback)
I read this book when it first appeared, and have since carried pleasant if rather vague memories of it. Rereading it some 16 years later, I'm horrified by how bad it is in places, and wonder what in the world I saw in it the first time around.
The opening section entitled "The Medieval Mind" is especially, embarrassingly, bad. In it, Manchester reduces an entire millennium to a quick and spotty sketch (this must account in part for the vagueness of my memories) which is full of over-generalizations (the medieval world wasn't a bona fide "civilization"), simplifications ("there was no room in the medieval mind for doubt; the possibility of skepticism simply did not exist"), and absolute howlers (medieval peasants went naked in the summer; the medieval mind had no spatial and temporal awareness or self-consciousness).
Less bad--but still bad--are the succeeding two sections, both much longer than the opening one on the medieval period (this, despite the book's subtitle). One of the sections is on the Renaissance and Reformation, the other focuses on Magellan and the European "discovery" of the New World (which Manchester tells us was the germ from which the entire book grew). There are some interesting biographical vignettes in the Renaissance section that probably account for my pleasant memories--Savonarola, da Vinci, and Erasmus in particular--but there's no real effort on Manchester's part to wrestle with the meaning of the new humanism that fueled the Renaissance or to explore the intricacies of the Reform revolt against Rome. Instead, he falls back on tired stereotypes; his long account of Martin Luther is especially hackneyed. Manchester's concluding account of Magellan's voyage, with its brief nod to Renaissance astronomy and the science of navigation, is enthusiastic and lively, and is probably the best--or least bad--part of the book. But again, it's sketchy and breathless.
So what accounts for the remarkable popularity of this book? Its quality should've landed it on the out-of-print shelve long ago. My only guess is that Manchester's well-deserved fame for his contemporaneous histories (WWII, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur) bestows a borrowed and undeserved aura of authority on this one. But authors (and their agents and editors) really ought to know when they're in over their heads, and refrain from writing bad copy just because they know they can get it published.
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78 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
"In the Medieval mind, there was also no awareness of time.", July 10, 2006
"In the Medieval mind, there was also no awareness of time." This breathtakingly ludicrous statement appears on page 22, and it represents everything that is horrifying about this book. (Just for starters, try telling any farmer of any era that he has "no awareness of time" and you'll end up in the manure pile, literally or figuratively.)
Read Regine Pernoud's "Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths" (published in May 2000) or go to the library and pull out the 38-year-old "Horizon book of the Middle Ages" instead. Manchester's vituperation of the era borders on hysteria.
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