It speaks to the failure of medieval Europe, writes popular historian William Manchester, that "in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent." European powers were so absorbed in destroying each other and in suppressing peasant revolts and religious reform that they never quite got around to realizing the possibilities of contemporary innovations in public health, civil engineering, and other peaceful pursuits. Instead, they waged war in faraway lands, created and lost fortunes, and squandered millions of lives. For all the wastefulness of medieval societies, however, Manchester notes, the era created the foundation for the extraordinary creative explosion of the Renaissance. Drawing on a cast of characters numbering in the hundreds, Manchester does a solid job of reconstructing the medieval world, although some scholars may disagree with his interpretations.


From Publishers Weekly
Manchester's marvelously vivid popular history humanizes the tumultuous span from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance. A one-week PW bestseller in cloth. Illustrations. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-- An absorbing and readable history, beginning with the collapse of Rome and ending with the redawning of intellectual pursuits in the Renaissance. Manchester's vivid descriptions of the misery and ignorance of the Middle Ages are the background for the second and main section of his book, which he calls the "shattering,"--the collapse of essentially unified thought and the rebirth of the pursuit of knowledge. His last section focuses on Magellan and his historic voyage, described as a primary event in contributing to Western man's changing view of the world. The story of his efforts to obtain backing for his venture is engrossing; the difficulties of the voyage are made real enough to feel.- Philip D. Winters, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VACopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Manchester describes the transition of the medieval mind, "shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition," into the Renaissance mind with villains such as Cesare Borgia and Torquemada and heroes such as da Vinci and Magellan. (LJ 4/15/92) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Manchester, temporarily putting aside his rousing Churchill series (The Last Lion), offers a disappointing retread of past histories about the explosive dawn of the modern age. For Manchester, the Middle Ages were a period of unrelieved superstition, corruption, violence, anti-intellectualism, and intolerance. The worst offenders were the Popes, particularly those ruling on the brink of the Protestant Reformation, whose catalogue of sins included assassination plots, simony, and nepotism. Their indulgence in fornication is described here with almost lip- smacking salaciousness (Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, is pictured as making love with one woman when he suddenly spies her naked daughter, whose ``rhythmic rotation of the hips...so intrigued [him] that he switched partners in midstroke''). Manchester's heroes include Leonardo da Vinci, Luther, and Erasmus; still, in attempting to paint the twilight of an old order in bold colors, he has lost all sense of nuance, acknowledging only in a sentence the Church's role in stabilizing Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed, and picturing the Middle Ages--which produced Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Dante, Chaucer, and the builders of Chartres--as altogether bad. Manchester has not forgotten the skills that, with invective, eloquence, and anecdote, make him a master storyteller. Yet, by his own admission, he did not master any recent scholarship on the early 16th century, which dooms him to retelling the same old stories recounted countless times before. The book Manchester could have written is glimpsed briefly only in the last quarter here, when he transforms Ferdinand Magellan into a paradigm of the tragic hero he celebrated in his works on JFK, Douglas MacArthur, and Churchill. Disheartening: a ``portrait'' painted in simplified strokes and with no perspective. (Maps and 33 b&w illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

One of the most volatile periods of western history witnessed the passing of the Dark Ages and the dawning of the Renaissance, illuminated by magnificent scientific and artistic achievements and spectacular leaps of thought and imagination. Manchester's narrative weaves together extraordinary figures, varied elements and accomplishments of the period. Illustrations. 5 maps.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth - the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history's greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains - the Renaissance.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Using only secondary sources, Manchester plunges readers into the medieval mind-set in a captivating, marvelously vivid popular history that humanizes the tumultuous span from the Dark Ages to the dawn of the Renaissance. He delineates an age when invisible spirits infested the air, when tolerance was seen as treachery and ``a mafia of profane popes desecrated Christianity.'' Besides re-creating the arduous lives of ordinary people, the Wesleyan professor of history peoples his tapestry with such figures as Leonardo, Machiavelli, Lucrezia Borgia, Erasmus, Luther, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Manchester ( The Arms of Krupp ) devotes much attention to Magellan, whose globe-straddling voyage shattered Christendom's implicit belief in Europe as the center of the universe. His portrayal of the Middle Ages as a time when the strong and the shrewd flourished, while the imaginative, the cerebral and the unfortunate suffered, rings true. Illustrations. (June)

Library Journal

Manchester describes the transition of the medieval mind, "shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition," into the Renaissance mind with villains such as Cesare Borgia and Torquemada and heroes such as da Vinci and Magellan. (LJ 4/15/92) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The popular biographer of Winston Churchill ( The Last Lion , LJ 5/1/83) and Douglas MacArthur ( American Caesar , LJ 9/1/78) has turned his attention to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. It was a hasty move. Under the title ``The Shattering,'' two-thirds of the book purports to deal with the decline of medieval superstition and obscurantism under the brilliant light of the Renaissance; actually, this section is a lengthy catalog of tired salacious tales about the clergy. The final third of the book claims that Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe and proof that the world was round broke forever the power of the medieval mind, a debatable thesis. Based on long out-of-date secondary sources, rife with anachronisms and errors of fact and interpretation, and filled with howlers such as Martin Luther ``was also the most anal of theologians . . . this derived from the national character of the Reich,'' this book will only perpetuate myths long refuted by modern scholarship. The popular audience for whom it is intended deserves much better. Not recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.-- Bennett D. Hill, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.

School Library Journal