Reddit reviews A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

A lot of people here are giving shitty answers and not helping because they disprove of your use of "dark ages."
On behalf on the internet I apologize. They are giving you crap for not knowing something you have expressed interest in learning about.
I am fascinated by the "Dark ages" and I have a history degree and I'm still using the term. I understand it to usually mean "the medieval times" or "the huge time-span that is not usually taught to the average student." Most history in public schools (at least that I've seen) tends to gloss over the time from the Romans to the early renaissance so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that's the era you want. It's my favorite era to study for that reason - most people know so little about this 1000 year span in history.
A good starter book for you would be A world lit only by Fire I loved this book. It's not overly scholarly and is a good read.
Another great one is Mysteries of the Middle Ages... Thomas Cahill is a great writer and if this version of the paperback is anything like my copy it is a visually stunning read. I discovered him through "How the Irish Saved Civilization" which was also great.
Mark Kurlansky's books (Salt and Cod specifically come to mind) are well written, specific histories that cover parts of this time period.
I wish my books weren't still packed (recently moved) because I want to dig through the stack and share them all. :) I suck at remembering names of stuff. I recommend browsing the amazon pages section of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" for other good recommendations.
Happy Reading!! :)
edit - just remembered this one on the byzantine empire of all the books I've read on the Byzantines, that one is my favorite.

edit I'm getting a lashing for "A World Lit Only By Fire" due to the fact that it contains historical inaccuracies.
Please read this one instead In the year 1000.
I'm not trying to recommend dry scholarly tomes, I am trying to think of books that are fun, interesting, and entertaining to read while still being informative.

How cool! Perhaps i'll have to use reddit as a "free stuff!" place in the future. Especially since I have two copies of the same book, though it was over-zealous Half-Price book-ing. Bought one while in Austin, read another book first, while visiting family in Ft Worth, bought it again because it was a bargain book and I thought I'd never bought it. Oops.

(It's this book )

A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester was incredible. It was like he took my AP European history class, and made it interesting. A wonderful account of how we stumbled upon the renaissance.

Love the costumes. All that armor! I doubt every part of it as being historically accurate, but it is such fun to watch. I really need to give A World Lit Only By Fire a reread. I remember it being a good sum up of this time period, but it has been a few years.

When atrocities are committed on a wide scale by any government or organized religious group there is usually some group that benefits and apolgists to be found for them.

The Catholic Encyclopedia offers a version of events you doubtless prefer:

>At that time the purity of the Catholic Faith in Spain was in great danger from the numerous Marranos and Moriscos, who, for material considerations, became sham converts from Judaism and Mohammedanism to Christianity. The Marranos committed serious outrages against Christianity and endeavoured to judaize the whole of Spain. The Inquisition, which the Catholic sovereigns had been empowered to establish by Sixtus IV in 1478, had, despite unjustifiable cruelties, failed of its purpose, chiefly for want of centralisation. In 1483 the pope appointed Torquemada, who had been an assistant inquisitor since 11 February 1482, Grand Inquisitor of Castile, and on 17 October extended his jurisdiction over Aragon.

Source: Catholic Encyclopedia - Tomás de Torquemada

Tomas de Torquemada was quite brutal in his dealings with his victims, but perhaps you have no qualms about such methods when they are in service of the faith to stamp out dissenting viewpoints or to crush any rival religions.

>Torquemada's methods reveal much about one of the age's most unpleasant characteristics: man's inhumanity to man. Sharp iron frames prevented victims from sleeping, lying, or even sitting. Braziers scorched the soles of their feet, racks stretched their limbs, suspects were crushed to death beneath chests filled with stones
> ,. . .
>In 1492, the year of Columbus, Spain's Jews were given three months to accept Christian baptism or be banished from the country. Even those who had been baptized were distrusted; Isabella had fixed her dark eye on converted Jews suspected of recidivism -- Marranos, she called them; "pigs" -- and marked them for resettlement as early as 1478. Eventually between thrity thousand and sixty thousand were expelled. Meantime the king of Portugal, finding merit in the Spanish decree, ordered the explusion of all Portguese Jews. His soldiers were instructed to massacre those who were slow to leave. During a single night in 1506 nearly four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword. Three years later the systematic presecution of the German Jews began.
>
> . . .
>
>At the turn of the sixteenth century, Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros -- who would become Spain's new inquisitor general -- provided Europe with an extraordinary example of medieval genocide. He ordered all Grenadine Moors to accpt baptism. Cisneros wasn't really seeking converts. He hoped to goad them to revolt. and when they did rise he annihilated them. Any nonconformity, any weakness, was despised; the handicapped were given not compassion, but terror and pain, as prescribed in Malleus maleficarum (The WItches Hammer), a handbook by the inquisitiors Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, which justified the shackling and burning of, among others, the mentally ill.

Source: A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester, Professor of History Emeritus at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, U.S. - First Paperback Edition pages 35-36

And, of course, one should not be gentle with heretics should one? Hence the heretics fork and the thumbscrew along with other such ingenious devices.

Just as there are those who justified and, in some cases still do justify, the anti-semitism of the Nazis, it doesn't surprise me that there are those who can defend the anti-semitism of those earlier times - The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition, was established in 1478 but wasn't definitively abolished until 1834. And just as there are those who will try to deny the atrocities of the Nazis there are those who seek to minimize or justify the atrocities committed during the Inquisition.

Of course the inquistion did not target only Jews and Jewish conversos (marranos) and Protestants, but also the Moriscos, converts to Catholicism from Islam.

>I would gladly justify the Institution to anyone who opposed it - as would all of the Spanish Catholics at the time.

Certainly there were many Spanish Catholics living at that time who approved of the Inquisition. According to The Inquisition, "During the 16th and 17th centuries, attendance at auto de fe reached as high as the attendance at bullfights." And certainly there were those who benefitted from the property siezed from the "heretics." There were many Germans who approved of the Nazis pogroms as well when their leaders whipped up hatred and fear among the populace.

It's a reddit version of pay it forward: a book recommended by Ron Howard on an AMA on here--A World Lit Only By Fire--is what inspired me to learn more about the Reformation.

:-) Ah, another book for my wish list! [I'm for almost anything the Catholic church is against...!] Thank you!

If you don't already have it, another book to recommend: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, by William Manchester.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562/

It's been about fifteen years since I read it; it's worth a re-read by now. I remember appreciating it greatly because it was interesting enough to read almost all of it at one sitting.

Look into Wm Manchester's work, specifically A World Lit Only By Fire for a look at the Medieval period and the Renaissance. His other works are great, but less broad.

I remember reading a long while back in a book that in the middle ages through the renaissance it was common for families to share one bed, no matter the circumstance. So the fact he was in bed with the mother with the daughter sharing may seem fucked up to us but it's not that strange in context.

There was a story of a pope who was banging a chick when her daughter who was sharing the bed began to imitate her mother's motions, the clergyman was to become to her he switched partners mid stroke.

I'll try and find which book it was and update this later.

edit: it was in "A World Lit Only by Fire" by William Manchester

in this book http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562

Nonsense. This has always reeked of apocryphy to me. The VAST majority of men and women in, say, the Middle Ages had nothing near a sword or servants but were peasants lucky to have a sleeping pallet/house made of sticks. Read the book "A World Lit Only by Fire."

Since they're paraphrasing it anyways (AND WHY ARE THEY SAYING "FIRELIGHT"), here's a great source for running a Dark Ages game:

http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562

It's not the best history, but it makes for FUN games.

A World Lit Only by Fire wasn't too bad.

Edit: Some of the reviews on Amazon are pretty damning, to the point that they make me regret that I read the book. This book looks better based on the reviews.