On "A World Lit Only by Fire"

I would like to begin by saying that William Manchester is basically the man. However, despite how much of the man he really is, he seems to have a severe man-crush on another the man, Ferdinand Magellan. More on that later.

A World Lit Only by Fire really grabbed me when I started reading it. I began by reading it on vacation up north and in the first two days of my vacation I read over 100 pages of the 296 page book. Over the next three days of my vacation, I read 30.

To provide some background, the book is split into three sections: The Medieval Mind, The Shattering, and A Man Alone. The first is only about 30 pages in length, the last nearly 80.

Being that the second is so lengthy, I think that Professor Manchester would have been better off carefully splitting (rather than shattering) The Shattering into multiple sections because it discussed some topics, that although not extremely varied, became confusing when all put together because of the time period overlap and such. The Shattering generally discusses the ways in which medieval Europe reached a barrier of corruption and stupidity that launched the world into the Renaissance.

The first section provides the reader with an idea of what the average medieval man would be like and how individuals and institutions thought or didn’t think and how society ran. The third section is nothing but a tale of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe and the isolation of his crew from goings-on in Europe at the time.

As for an analysis of Professor Manchester’s style and rhetoric in this book, I noticed a few things in particular. I have not read any of his other works but certainly plan to when I find the time. Immediately, I noticed it read slightly different than most non-fiction books I have previously read. Perhaps that is because many of those are chronologies of events told by primary sources in great detail or are often autobiographical. This book, though is also unlike a history textbook because it reads a bit more conversationally and informally. It is almost like a lecture for a class of 25-50 students. Manchester doesn’t tend to pose rhetorical questions as many lecturers might, but in many ways his short two page sections that make up the book are like short lessons.

Something else I took note of while I was reading was that Manchester often uses longs lists to emphasize points. These lists can be for descriptive purposes, but more often they list a number of nouns or verbs to show depth or breadth of a certain topic. For instance, at the very end of the The Medieval Mind, he sets up his next section to discuss some certain men and two women influential to the times:
Some of the dragons were benign, even saintly; others were wicked. All, however, would seem monstrous to those who cherished the status quo, and their names included Johannes Gutenberg, Cesare Borgia, Johann Tetzel, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Jakob Fugger, Francois Rabelais, Girolamo Savonarola, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Niccolo Machiavelli, William Tyndale, John Calvin, Vascon Nunez de Balboa, Emperor Charles V, King Henry VIII, Tomas de Torquemada, Lucrezia Borgia, William Caxton, Gerardus Mercator, Girolamo Aleandro, Ulrich von Hutten, Martin Waldseemuller, Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Chrisopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and—most fearsome of all, the moan who would destroy the very world cartographers had drawn—Ferdinand Magellan.

Was that list long enough for you? I can name many others that Manchester talked about with some extent in the book, but there are also two or three of those names I swear never came up.

I’d like to direct your attention again to the above quotation, but just to the last two lines about Magellan. Honestly, I was expecting the build up at the end for one big name, but I expected it to be Martin Luther, Michelangelo, or Leonardo Da Vinci; the latter two don’t even appear in the list. In any case, the description he uses to build up Magellan is quite characteristic throughout the book. He uses flowing, crescendo-ing, often lengthy sentences to describe a person. I enjoyed this for the most part, but it became a bit annoying at times. He often starts a point with a short compound sentence and follows it with a longer, descriptive one or two that give examples. Additionally, the subject or object, followed by a dash, followed by a phrase, followed by a dash, followed by the remainder of the sentence, is a ubiquitous tool in Manchester’s writing. He uses the dash to insert appositives and parenthetical elements that he feels deserve additional emphasis. I must say, it’s effective as hell, too.

Some criticisms I have of Manchester, and this might be to my own fault as well, deal with confusion. For one thing, the book doesn’t go in chronological order, it discusses a person or event and then, to provide background, has to tangent to talk about the people and places involved. The result is that in the middle of the book, the reader is assumed to know about some characters and events already and then is being introduced to new things that seem like they should follow the events already discussed, but are really occurring before hand. It gets very confusing and a more detailed timeline provided with the book would have been nice. Another source of confusion to the somewhat unengaged reader is that Manchester might go a full two pages referring to a character only as “he” or “she” and the reader easily forgets who is being talked about, especially when there are multiple people being discussed. A character might be referred to by multiple names or titles too. For instance, Martin Luther is, among others, “the monk, the heretic, the professor, the young priest, the Franciscan, the Wittenberg man…”

The final section of the book is where the man-crush the Professor Manchester has for Ferdinand Magellan really becomes apparent. For one thing, the final section, at times, reads more like a fiction book or non-fiction story because of the more romantic language and description. He certainly borrows much from Don Antonio, Magellan’s biographer.

The last few pages of the book discuss the ways that the medieval world exploded or shattered into the renaissance and how the 247 men of Magellan’s crew that didn’t return to Spain didn’t get to witness some of the most explosive events of it. The ending also portrays Magellan as an immortal hero and gives a morality lesson in what heroism truly is.

I could talk all day about the history lessons I’ve learned from A World Lit Only by Fire. This book has been eye-opening by increasing both my historical knowledge, and ability to read and hopefully has taught me things to apply to my writing.