37 pages • 1 hour read
William ManchesterA World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Ferdinand Magellan
Manchester begins and ends the book with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, whose circumnavigation of the globe proved that the world was, without question, round. Magellan was an explorer in the idealistic sense. Although he kept this part of himself private, he was a romantic who believed in the pursuit of heroism for its own sake. His voyages would set the course of modern cartography and reveal more of the world than anyone else had to date. He would die in a battle after locating the Filipinas, shortly after he had begun to embrace a religious fervor that, while it was nothing so extreme as the medieval ignorance and brutality described in most of the book, began to worry his men, who needed him to be rational and deliberate. Magellan is the hero of Manchester’s book, and it is appropriate that he appears at both the beginning and the end.
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a priest, intellectual, and the catalyst for the religious revolution that would ultimately end the Dark Ages and bring the medieval mind into what would become the modern world. Martin was raised by an abusive father who hated the Church, which prompted his bitter son to join the priesthood out of spite. Luther eventually grew suspicious of, and then outraged by, the Church’s corruption and the lush and lascivious lives that most of the clergy enjoyed. Luther’s most famous moment was when he posted Ninety-Five Theses, his objections against the Church, various doctrines, and the hypocrisy of the Vatican in failing to practice what it taught. His outrage grew, and the Church condemned him. Luther was eventually forced to hide in a castle under the false name of Junker Georg. But the revolution he had started could not be stopped. A multitude of Christian branches sprang out of Lutheranism, most of which were as intolerant of each other as they were of the Catholic Church and just as violent.
Erasmus
Erasmus was an academic and an author who wrote what would today be called bestsellers. Satire was his literary weapon. He wrote subversive books that reasoned that all of life was absurd, and then set out to prove his propositions in exhaustive length, all while remaining loyal to the Church while simultaneously questioning it. Despite his continued allegiance to the Church, he was excommunicated after his death, and believers were forbidden to read his works.
John Calvin
Although Manchester does not devote a great deal of time to John Calvin, Calvin is one of the best negative examples of religious zealotry that came out of the Reformation. Calvin turned the city of Geneva into a police state and installed himself as a religious dictator. His religious rules mandated all aspects of life, although he cited the Bible as the source of the rules he enforced, particularly Leviticus. Any infraction could result in torture, death, shunning, or exile—from forgetting to pray, to conceiving a child out of wedlock, to eating the wrong number of meals in a day. Calvin gloried in the brutal restrictions and vicious executions he carried out on sinners and misbehavers. He saw all disobedience as an attack on God’s word. He was determined to fight against sin as hard as the Devil fought against righteousness. That a character such as Calvin could be a result of Luther’s empowering intellectual revolution is, for Manchester, a sobering warning that all progress has the potential for risk.
Henry VIII
Henry VIII was the King of England during a particularly tumultuous time. His wife Catherine had failed to produce an heir for him, so he set his sights on Anne Boleyn, a young woman with whom he was infatuated. He expected the Pope to grant him an exception that would allow him to divorce Catherine, but he was met with great resistance. Because the Church had not yet sanctioned divorce, the Pope refused to allow it, which stymied Henry’s plans to wed Anne. A series of intricate political maneuvers followed, in which Henry married Anne in secret. Once they were found out, the Pope responded with condemning his actions. In turn, Henry denounced the Vatican and started his own Christian church, with himself at the head. This rift between the Crown and the Church was unprecedented. Henry’s defiance enraged the papacy and changed the course of the Church’s relationship with England. Henry also legally stopped all payments and taxes to the Vatican, which was a grievous economic wound. In his fearlessness against the Church, he was parallel to Luther in some ways, although his conflict with the Church was fueled by his lust for Anne as much as his sense of righteous indignation.
