Rekiwi's Blog

Yeah. It's a crappy title for a blog entry. Sue me.

I'm reading William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance.

It's a rather light work "with no scholarly pretensions" according to the author, meaning that each paragraph doesn't strain under the weight of 20 pages of footnotes and citations.

I haven't even made it out of the Author's Note and I'm guffawing.

Take, for example, Manchester's trope of the kaleidoscope as he muses on how his portrait of the age coalesced: "The period became a kind of kaleidoscope for me; every time I shook it, I saw a new picture."

Manchester sets up the pay-off when he compares his vision with that of an earlier medievalist scholar, quoting Henry Osborn Taylor in his The Mediaeval Mind: "The present work is not occupied with the brutalities and superstition of mediaeval life, nor with all the lower grades of ignorance and superstition abounding in the Middle Ages... Consequently I have not such things very actively in mind when speaking of the mediaeval genius. That phrase, and the like, in this book, will signify the more informed and constructive spirit of the mediaeval time."

Manchester then cuts loose with his zinger: "No matter how hard I shake my kaleidoscope, I cannot see what he saw." He then sets the tone expertly, questioning Taylor's idealistic focus on Christian ideals and his predecessor's dismissal of the "lower grades" of human experience by contending that an understanding of the medieval mind cannot be "achieved without a careful study of brutality, ignorance, and delusions in the Middle Ages, not just among the laity, but at the highest Christian altars." Manchester then punctuates his argument with a flourish: "Christianity survived despite medieval Christians, not because of them."

I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.