A World Lit Only by Fire
William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire is the preeminent popular history of civilization's rebirth after the Dark Ages.
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What Hacker News says
- Two other books in that vein that I really liked:
1. A World Lit Only by Fire — William Manchester
2. One Summer: America, 1927 — Bill Bryson
- Off the cuff, I think you might enjoy William Manchester's "A World Lit Only By Fire."
- A fantastic book to read on this topic is "A world lit only by fire" by William Manchester. He also makes the case that Europe emerged from superstition because the Pope declared the world to be flat just as Magellan circumnavigated the globe, and the printing press permitted millions to learn about it. The age of myth and superstition was rapidly replaced by the Enlightenment.
Update: as has been pointed out below, Manchester overstated his case. It was still an enjoyable read some 16 years ago, and I still agree with the idea that the printing press - by disseminating news and knowledge at speed - undermined the prevailing authority of the day.
- > A World Lit Only by Fire
I loved this book in my high school AP Euro class. I revisited it much later in my studies, and was dismayed to realize how lacking in proper research and citation it was. Manchester makes numerous bold claims without mentioning resources, many of which were directly contradicted by the more thoroughly-established works I was then reading. I had learned a lot of "facts" that turned out to be inaccurate, imprecise, or speculative.
I'll let others with more knowledge correct me, but my overall impression is that he was pushing sensational narratives rather than advancing historical knowledge.
> One Summer: America
I haven't heard of this and will take a look. Thanks for the recommendation.
- Which Pope would that be? Wikipedia only mentions there was some sort of 8th Century controversy, but what little survives doesn't touch on the shape of the earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Early_Middle_Ages Hard to imagine this wouldn't be mentioned. I also noticed the reviews and reception of A World Lit Only by Fire are scathing, and if what they cite is correct, appropriately so.
It's my understanding its shape as a sphere was well accepted for a very long time, e.g. Wikipedia, citing a 1995 German PhD dissertation says "A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that 'since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth.'"
See further https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth or the book I just found, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Flat-Earth-Columbus-Historia...), about how modern era "historians" created out of whole cloth the idea that it was thought to be flat back then. See the latter Wikipedia article over the issue with Columbus, which had to do with his incorrect estimation of the earth's circumference. If not for the convenient location of "the new world", he and his crews would have perished since he had the distance to the Far East off by a factor of 4. While his contemporaries weren't exactly sure of the circumference, they knew his voyage as envisioned would have ended in ruin.
