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Suppressed Darkness On The Medieval Mind Map

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Suppressed Darkness on the Medieval Mind Map

William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance unveils an in- depth look at the Late Medieval Ages in Europe and touches upon the Renaissance. It is most well known as the time period that occurred after the fall of the Roman Empire- when the eastern world seemed to have plummeted into an age of regression and darkness. Manchester’s central proposition was “The power of the medieval mind had been irrevocably broken” (295). The dimensions of the medieval mind were cloaked from the outside world and suppressed by the ever-powerful dogmas of the Catholic Church, for there “was no room for doubt; the possibility of skepticism simply did not exist” (20). At the same time, a new “era” was rising in Europe, accompanied by an increasing rate in literacy, new innovations, the printing press, powerful political figures, and the appraisals of the Catholic Church. A new cultural movement began to appear, known as the Renaissance, and the darkness of the medieval mind map was forever shattered, to remain a pale illusion. Humanists, such as Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, and inventors and explorers such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Nicolas Copernicus, and Ferdinand Magellan guided the way to a new ideology of independent thinking. Following the campaign of upcoming thinkers, movements, and changes that would turn people’s blind eye, Manchester concluded his point with the tale of Magellan’s heroic

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