This six page undergraduate paper examines William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire. The author notes that the book's main thesis is that the infrastructure of medieval Europe had been in decline for a thousand years. His secondary thesis suggests that this decline was due to European wars, revolts, and religious disputes, which prevented European powers from making progress in civil engineering, public health, and science. His third thesis is related to the first two, and asserts that despite these problems, the medieval era provided the criteria that triggered the Renaissance.
