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If anyone read the book, A world lit only by fire, by William Manchester, could you please help me out. plz...im begging you
Give specific thoughts,values, and actions of Magellan which caused Manchester to select him as the exemplar of the Renaissance spirit. What is the contrast between the Renaissance spirit(Magellan) and the medieval mind?

plz help me out. plz.

2007-08-20 15:50:05 · 2 answers · asked by Rachel 2 in Arts & Humanities History

2 answers

Back to front in answer to your question - the medieval mind was severely constricted, "close-minded", resisting any new ideas. There was wealth and power for the Church to be the only source of answers. There was comfort for the people in ignorance and tradition. Most did not want hear about the sun being the center of the solar system rather than the earth. To spout such blasphemy was to court an agonizing death.
Manchester writes (p. 224) that Magellan was a "dreamer", an "imaginative" thinker, which would be the polar opposite
of the Church dominated mind medieval which would brook no ideas of change (p. 229).
The best specific I can present is from page 291. After Magellan's expedition had shown that the world was indeed round, spinning, and circling the sun as Copernicus had said,
the pope and "28 successive pontiffs" denied these truths -
because they contradicted the all knowing Church. Yet the
infallibility of the Church was widely known to be broken.
The Church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, did not have all the answers. Still they remained close minded for another "three hundred years" (p. 291). Magellan was the open minded visionary - the antithesis of the medieval minded Church. He sought discovery and found it.

2007-08-20 20:19:00 · answer #1 · answered by Spreedog 7 · 0 0

from wiki
The final section of the work, One Man Alone, is a description of the voyage of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the globe. The section expands upon the life and personality of Magellan, his setbacks, and his eventual death in the Philippines in an attempt to convert the natives to Catholicism there. Manchester's argument is ultimately that Magellan's voyage was concurrent with and, on several levels, symptomatic of the shattering of what he defines as the medieval mind.

2007-08-20 23:23:58 · answer #2 · answered by redunicorn 7 · 0 0

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