A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance

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 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.