Updated with a new foreword by Tom Hanks: acclaimed historian William Manchester A World Lit Only by Fire is a captivating and marvelously vivid popular history of the Middle Ages (Publishers Weekly). From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of the Inquisition and the misery of the Black Death no era has been a greater source of awe horror and wonder than the Middle Ages. In graceful prose and with the authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history William Manchester leads us from a civilization teetering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth during the Renaissance a 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 result is an unforgettable journey into the medieval mind as Manchester ingeniously re-creates the lives of ordinary people and offers vivid portraits of the era s most astonishing figures such as Galileo Machiavelli Anne Boleyn and Ferdinand Magellan. Manchester provides easy access to a fascinating age when our modern mentality was just being born. --Chicago Tribune