What is the author's perspective in the nonfiction book, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age?

William Manchester (1922-2004) was a renowned American journalist and biographer. He wrote eighteen books over the course of his career and won the National Humanities Medal for his work. For much of his life, he was a journalist but he later became an academic via Wesleyan University. Manchester is best known for being commissioned in 1964 by the Kennedy family for writing an account of JFK's assassination. Manchester is also known for being heavily influenced by H.L. Mencken.

Manchester's perspective is characteristic of popular history of early to mid-twentieth century America. A standard view of the Middle Ages is that they were best described as "the Dark Ages" due to the fact that they were religiously homogeneous, ruled by the Roman Catholic Church, highly superstitious, violent, repressive, impoverish, and famished. Only with the rise of Protestantism, Humanism and other early modern ideologies was the back of medieval Christendom broken and a new age of economic growth, political freedom, religious pluralism, and secularism emerged. Consequently, Manchester is keen to impress upon the reader that Europe in the Dark Ages did not even constitute a civilization and that the real progress in history was the gradual destruction of sincere Christian belief, especially belief in the reliability of the Bible and the infallibility of the Papacy. It is worthy of note, however, that Manchester is particularly polemical given his ideological commitments.