A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind & the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age Book

I haven't read anything else by William Manchester, but he's a good writer, and I'm sure he's a smart guy. He's written several biographies on Churchill, and one on JFK, and a memoir detailing his experiences during World War II in the Pacific. But Manchester is a reporter and a chronicler of modern history, and his rather sudden attempt to catalogue the medieval and early modern era in about three hundred pages is - at best - a very misguided effort that paints a terribly artificial and superficial picture of the Middle Ages. At worst, it's a willfully ignorant piece of polemic that, despite the title of his book's first section, makes absolutely no attempt at truly understanding the medieval mind.

The problem boils down to the fact that there wasn't nearly enough research done by the author to allow him to write a book like this. Apparently, Manchester literally wrote this book as he was researching it, and based it entirely on secondary literature. Instead of spending a few years researching and getting a feel for the era, the complexities and viewpoints and the historically fuzzy spots, he just sat down, picked up some (often outdated) secondary sources and wrote a book as he was reading them.

It would be one thing if Manchester had simply come to his conclusions through genuine scholarship. It's certainly a conclusion you could make from looking at some medieval primary sources, though I'd argue it's a superficial one. But Manchester doesn't bother. And the idea of writing a history book that spans about 1200 years without picking up a primary source is, honestly, kind of reprehensible to me. It's not that Manchester misinterpreted these people, it's that he seemed to genuinely not particularly care how they viewed their own world, at least not enough to pick up a book and read a few of their own words. To write a general history book on an era that spanned a millennium and then to harshly condemn that era without reading a primary source written by the people who lived through it is genuinely irresponsible.

Early on, Manchester makes the kind of astounding statement that "in the medieval mind, there was no conception of time." In microcosm, that represents everything that is wrong with this book. On a superficial level, sure, there's some truth in the statement - people didn't keep track of time in the same way that we do today. But the idea that a predominantly agricultural society had no conception of time doesn't make any kind of logical sense, and from a theological or philosophical standpoint, it's hugely wrong, and once again serves to show that Manchester seems entirely unaware of the underpinnings of the era. And when you're writing a history book like this one, that's exactly what you need to get right.