A World Lit Only by Fire Quotes

“All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship of the early sixteenth century.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

“Europe was no longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the universe.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that patterns emerge.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Humanism, by its very character, implied a revolt against all religious authority. It still does; the evangelists who denounce “secular humanism” five centuries later recognize”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Leonardo’s cosmology, based on what he called saper vedere (knowing how to see) was, in effect, a blunt instrument assaulting the fatuity which had, among other things, permitted a mafia of profane popes to desecrate Christianity.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Rising gusts of wind, disregarded at the time, signaled the coming storm. The first gales affected the laity. Knighthood, a pivotal medieval institution, was dying. At a time when its ceremonies had finally reached their fullest development, chivalry was obsolescent and would soon be obsolete. The knightly way of life was no longer practical. Chain mail had been replaced by plate, which, though more effective, was also much heavier; horses which were capable of carrying that much weight were hard to come by, and their expense, added to that of the costly new mail, was almost prohibitive. Worse still, the mounted knight no longer dominated the battlefield; he could be outmaneuvered and unhorsed by English bowmen, Genoese crossbowmen, and pikemen led by lightly armed men-at-arms, or sergeants. Europe’s new armies were composed of highly trained, well-armed professional infantrymen who could remain in the field, ready for battle, through an entire season of campaigning. Since only great nation-states could afford them, the future would belong to powerful absolute monarchs. By A.D. 1500 most of these sovereign dynasties were in place, represented by England’s Henry VII, France’s Louis XII, Russia’s Ivan III, Scandinavia’s John I, Hungary’s Ladislas II, Poland’s John Albert, and Portugal’s Manuel I. Another major player was on the way: in 1492, when the fall of Granada destroyed the last vestiges of Moorish power on the Iberian peninsula, Spaniards completed the long reconquest of their territory. The union of their two chief crowns with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile laid the foundations for modern Spain; together they began suppressing their fractious vassals. Germany and Italy, however, were going to be late in joining the new Europe. On both sides of the Alps prolonged disputes over succession delayed the coalescence of central authority. As a result, in the immediate future Italians would continue to live in city-states or papal states and Germans would still be ruled by petty princes. But this fragmentation could not last. A kind of centripetal force, strengthened by emerging feelings of national identity among the masses, was reshaping Europe. And that was a threat to monolithic Christendom.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Charlemagne was a just and enlightened ruler—for the times. His loyalty to the Church was absolute, though he sometimes chose peculiar ways to demonstrate it. Conquering Saxon rebels, he gave them a choice between baptism and immediate execution; when they demurred, he had forty-five hundred of them beheaded in one morning.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Mohr, a colleague and protégé, resigned from the faculty to preach the joys of illiteracy, and a number of Wittenberg undergraduates, seeing no point in further study, left their lecture halls to become craftsmen.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“The regimes that encouraged and supported the spice trade were, in effect, accomplices in the poisoning of their own people. Moreover, medieval Europeans were extremely vulnerable to disease. This was the down side of exploration. The discoverers and their crews had carried European germs to distant lands, infecting native populations. Then, when they returned, they bore exotic diseases which could spread across the continent unchecked.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“In 1858 only 5 percent of British army recruits could read and write; by the turn of the century the figure had risen to 85.4 percent. The 1880s had brought the institution of free libraries, which was followed by an explosion in journalism and the emergence of the twentieth-century mass culture which has transformed Western civilization.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Nevertheless the most barefaced lies die hard when influence and prejudice have a vested interest in them.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“No attack on Christianity is more dangerous,” Jerome Wolf wrote Tycho Brahe in 1575, “than the infinite size and depth of the universe.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“scrofula”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

“Reflective men make uncomfortable prosecutors. By nature and by training, they tend to see the other side and give it equal weight.”
― William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire