Research Paper on:
Religious and Political Status Quo of the Reformation in William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
we can readily imagine, there was much more to the time period than any famous individuals existence could show. In William Manchesters book "A World Lit Only by Fire" we  are presented with a very powerful illustration of what the Medieval mind and life was all about. We are taken into the real world, the world of the commoner and  the world of disease and limited resources, a world very unlike our own. And, in that world we begin to understand something more of the people and the time. In  the following paper we examine the political and religious status quo of the time as presented by Manchester. The paper then discusses the Reformation, or what Manchester refers to as  "The Shattering." Political and Religious Status Quo One of the most important things we learn from Manchesters book concerning the political and religious status quo is that the  Church was the center of all. It controlled everything and everyone. The Church was not only the institution which provided religious faith and religious rules for the people, but also  the political reality that insisted that all citizens of this time period, within Europe, adhere to every law presented by the Church. There was no separation of Church and State.  Now, for the most part we see that the people believed that the powers of the Church were directly issued by God. They believed what the Church and the  religious leaders told them. In all honesty, they were to afraid not to believe the leaders of the Church. As Manchester allows us to see, today we think such beliefs  are perhaps ridiculous, but we must remember that the people in the Middle Ages do not know much of what we know today. They did not know that the earth