I was lent this book recently by a friend. It is engagingly-written and I found myself easily pulled into it, but it wasn’t long before I started getting a nagging feeling that it had bought in too deeply to the long-held myths about how very dark the Dark Ages were, and how backwards and even depraved were the people of medieval Europe.

I have a habit of fact-checking random bits from books I am reading, a habit more readily indulged when you encounter sweeping claims like that medieval man had no sense of self or ego at all, which appears in the first chapter of A World Lit Only By Fire. Frustratingly, the book provides no foot- or endnotes—though it has a bibliography, there are no clues as to what sources inspired which claims and arguments.

It turns out that professional historians have a fairly dim view of the book. Jeremy duQuesnay writes, in 1995 Vol 70 of Speculum:

This is an infuriating book. The present reviewer hoped that it would simply fade away, as its intellectual qualities (too strong a word) deserved. Unfortunately, it has not: one keeps meeting well-intentioned, perfectly intelligent people (including some colleagues in other disciplines-especially the sciences) who have just read this book and want to discuss why anyone would ever become a medievalist.

duQuesnay’s review is withering but short. He calls out a few items as particularly egregious examples of the errors and misinterpretations made by Manchester, but doesn’t elaborate on them, perhaps because of the limited space of the book review format, perhaps because it would be reasonable to expect his audience (fellow medievalists) to immediately recognize them for what they are.

I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a bit more time going into some depth on some passages. I chose page 57 from the chapter “The Shattering” partly because it seemed so full of generalizations that must be largely false, but also partly at random since the first few chapters of the book are so full of claims such as this.

The first full paragraph begins:

In all classes, table manners were atrocious. Men behaved like boors at meals. They customarily ate with their hats on and frequently beat their wives at table, while chewing a sausage or gnawing at a bone.

Some contrary sources and arguments:

  • Medieval Table Manners: The Messiest Myth? rightly notes that, anthropologically speaking, “people across the world don’t like to eat with people who are messy, dirty, or free with their bodily functions”. It would be surprising to discover that centuries worth of people across a vast geographical range and all classes bucked this trend.
    • Additionally, this article mentions several medieval sources that specifically outline expected table manners and courtesies.
  • According to Minding your Manners in the Middle Ages, “Manners were so important that an entire genre of literature was developed to teach children how to mind their manners. This genre is known as the courtesy book, and it shows just how much manners mattered in the Middle Ages.”
    • These courtesy books apparently began to appear in Europe in the 12th century, originally in Latin, but eventually appearing in French and English by the late 14th century.
  • These both show at least that manners mattered to some classes of people, though given the very low levels of literacy, it doesn’t quite seem warranted to attribute equal concern for table manners to peasants as to nobility; at least the former would not have had nearly the same opportunity to encounter this literature.
  • Also, what does Manchester have against wearing one’s hat at the table? As if that is some universal etiquette violation on the order of spitting in someone’s face.

Proceeding along page 57:

Their clothes and their bodies were filthy. The story was often told of the peasant in the city who, passing a lane of perfume shops, fainted at the unfamiliar scent and was revived by holding a shovel of excrement under his nose.

Perhaps it was not as widely known in 1992 when Manchester’s book was published, but I think it is more common knowledge now that early modern Europeans were actually less inclined to bathe than their medieval ancestors.

  • From Did people in the Middle Ages take baths? we learn that, again unsurprisingly, attitudes and practices around bathing varied across places and throughout time during the medieval period. Certain English authors apparently thought the Vikings “overly concerned with cleanliness since they took a bath once a week”, while other writers prescribed strict rules around when to bathe, how long to bathe for, how much sex to have before bathing (not too much, but also not too little). Royalty attempted to impress each other with luxurious baths, while Paris had more than 32 public bathhouses by the 13th century, these being much more common than private bathing stations.
    • The decline of the public bathhouse coming into the 16 century is partially attributed to the prevalence of diseases (and theories about how it could be caught) and increasingly puritanical attitudes towards nakedness, especially in mixed sex company.
  • According to sources from this History: Stack Exchange post:
    • poor and rural people (the majority of the population) probably did not bathe very often, especially in the winter
    • Anglo-Saxons reportedly did wash regularly, even if they couldn’t have a full bath
  • Certainly medieval towns would have generally been smellier and dirties than modern ones. But it does a great disservice to that era to imagine that no one cared, or that they even preferred to wallow in filth as the above story of the perfume-abhorring peasant does. The Medieval Sense of Smell, Stench and Sanitation relates a complaint in 1380 that “certain evildoers” had polluted a local waterway by throwing in animal waste. This complaint resulted in a “commission of inquiry” by the King.

Next we read from Manchester that:

Pocket handkerchiefs did not appear until the early 1500s, and it was mid-century before they came into general use. Even sovereigns wiped their noses on their sleeves, or, more often, on their footmen’s sleeves. Napkins were also unknown; guests were warned not to clean their teeth on the tablecloth. Guests in homes were also reminded that they should blow their noses with the hand that held the knife, not the one holding the food.

  • In the Boke of Curtasye from 1475, referenced above in Medieval Table Manners, we read specifically that one ought not “despoil the napkin recklessly”. That this seems to be a relatively well-known source gives a good sense of how significant Manchester’s errors are.
  • Les Countenance de Table was a late 15th century French book intended to be read to children, translated into English and published there in 1503. In it we read, “Do not touch your ears or nose with your bare hands”, presumably meaning that if one is to blow or wipe one’s nose, it should be done with some sort of cloth. If this advice is being published in the 1480s or 90s and translated shortly thereafter, it seems fair to assume it was relatively popular or standard, at least amongst wealthier classes, and had also been so for some time, given that knowledge and customs generally spread and changed much more slowly at that time. It seems that Manchester read an anecdote somewhere about some sovereign once wiping hits nose on a sleeve or footman and inferred from that, contrary to other evidence, that it was expected or even admired practice for the entire medieval period, at all times and places.

The rest of the page is mostly less controversial: Manchester discusses how forks did not exist until later in the middle ages. However, he then mentions “There was such a thing as bad form, but it had nothing to do with manners”, completely eliding the significant literature merely sketched above that dealt precisely with manners.

Manchester achieves a truly breathtaking rate of errors per page, perhaps exceeded only (in my personal reading experience) by Zecharia Sitchin’s highly entertaining but incredible work on ancient astronauts, Genesis Revisited. They are, though, largely errors of ommission and emphasis; I don’t think all these rebuttals show that Manchester’s generalizations were completely wrong, but it is as though he is determined to avoid any nuance or recognition that things may have been more complicated than he is letting on. It makes for reading that is engaging and fun in a “oh my god, weren’t they crazy” sort of way, but the book can’t be taken seriously, which is frankly one of the worst criticisms one can make of work that claims to be a history.

Postscript

Having finished the book, my impression is that the later chapters focused on religious controversy (in which figures like Luther and Erasmus figure prominently) and the accomplishments of Magellan are much more reliable from a factual and interpretive point of view, though it is hard to set aside my distrust of Manchester’s perspective arising from the first few chapters.