Case Study: A World Lit Only by Fire
Written by American historian William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire is an informal history of the European Middle Ages, structured into three sections: "The Medieval Mind", "The Shattering", and "One Man Alone". In the book, Manchester scathingly posits, as the title suggests, that the Middle Ages were ten centuries of technological stagnation, short-sightedness, bloodshed, feudalism, and an oppressive Church wedged between the golden ages of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.
In the 15th century that all began to change with the dawning of the Italian Renaissance. New ideas about science, education, art, and even religion were beginning to be adopted by Europeans. For the first time in centuries Europe was undergoing a change that would one day significantly change the culture and traditions of all Europeans.
In the 15th century that all began to change with the dawning of the Italian Renaissance. New ideas about science, education, art, and even religion were beginning to be adopted by Europeans. For the first time in centuries Europe was undergoing a change that would one day significantly change the culture and traditions of all Europeans.
Guiding Question:
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Topics for Discussion:
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Reading:
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Read Ch. 11 The Later Middle Ages and the excerpts of A World Lit Only by Fire provided below and identify attributes that make up the medieval mindset as described by Historian William Manchester.
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The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension. 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. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1,500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs' basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, spades, rakes, scythes, and balanced [Page 6] sickles. Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals. Surrounding them was the vast, menacing, and at places impassable, Hercynian Forest, infested by boars; by bears; by the hulking medieval wolves who lurk so fearsomely in fairy tales handed down from that time; by imaginary demons; and by very real outlaws, who flourished because they were seldom pursued. Although homicides were twice as frequent as deaths by accident, English coroners' records show that only one of every hundred murderers was ever brought to justice. Moreover, abduction for ransom was an acceptable means of livelihood for skilled but landless knights. One consequence of medieval peril was that people huddled closely together in communal homes. They married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away.
The Economy
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Trade on the Mediterranean, once a Roman lake, was perilous; Vandal pirates, and then Muslim pirates, lay athwart the vital sea routes. Agriculture and transport were inefficient; the population was never fed adequately. A barter economy yielded to coinage only because the dominant lords, enriched by plunder and conquest, needed some form of currency to pay for wars, ransoms, crusades, knighting of their sons, and their daughters’ marriages. Royal treasury officials were do deficient in elementary skills that they were dependent upon arithmetic learned from the Arabs; the name exchequer emerged because they used a checkered cloth as a kind of abacus in doing sums.
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Perception of Change
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Catholicism had thus found its greatest strength in total resistance to change…Saint Vincent of Lerins had written in his Memoranda that the Church had become “a faithful and ever watchful guardian of the dogmas which have been committed to her charge. In this secret deposit she changes nothing, she takes nothing from it, she adds nothing to it.” When the cartographer of the Middle Ages came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote: Beware: Dragons Lurk Beyond Here.
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Crash Course World History:
The Dark Ages... How Dark Were They, Really? |
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