A World Only Lit By Fire, By William Manchester

The novel, A World Only Lit By Fire The Medieval Mind And The Renaissance Portrait Of an Age, by William Manchester, is a rather intricate and perplexing exposition on the Middle Ages/Renaissance. Throughout the publication Manchester merges many of his own personal opinions as well historical information. Even though he does includes historical accuracies within his work, many readers will see this book as being overly “bias”. This unique viewpoint the author has obtained helps compare and contrast these two dissimilar time periods. William has displayed his views on both time periods very clearly. He dissects both time periods and shows that each have innumerable troubles with scandalous occurrences. Not to mention there were disparate ways

He believed that the Middle Ages had a decline because of religious despotism of the Church, the collapse of political organizations and the disperse of diseases. Manchester wrote: “Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the empire’s drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning.”His construct of the medieval psyche fashioned in the viciousness and demise of the historic period was moreover impacted by the dictates of the congregation, particularly Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, which proclaimed the "pursuit of knowledge, unless sanctified by a holy mission, was a pagan act, and therefore vile" (Manchester 6). Not to mention, the preponderance of people were illiterate. He emphasizes that everyone from Charlemagne, the greatest and first ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, to the typical peasant had restricted to no literacy skills. Although, the rulers and royalty were sometimes uneducated they were seen to be “above

Nonetheless, by 1500 A.D. many of the medieval institutions vanished to permit the new mindset to emerge. Even though the Renaissance used Oligarchy as its government, the pope was still in power. The economy in the Middle Ages was based mostly on agriculture. Most of the subjects during the Middle Ages were part of the new expanding nation states. Correspondingly, they did not have governments that were stable, which resulted in the adaption of the Feudal system. The novelist analyzes the resemblances betwixt the Roman Civilization and Middle Ages. The Roman Civilization displayed substantial esteem for regulation and control. Throughout the Middle Ages, the government used was the feudal system whereas, the Roman Empire had a republic. Be that as it may, both were faith-based. The individuals of the Roman Empire and the people of the Middle Ages were devout catholics. William Manchester does a thorough job at differentiating the culture of modern life and the medieval mentality.Within in the medieval mind there was no conception of time. Most people could not differentiate the century much less a fixed date. For penniless ranchers, the time proceeded by seasons. The sole purpose for knowing the days of the week were to know when Sabbath was. This comes as a remarkable dissimilarity to the present day lifestyle. Presently