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Title: Cliched Pseudo-history
Review: While, as many other reviewers have noted, Manchester's biography of Magellan at the conclusion of this work is certainly scholarly and insightful, the rest of this text, especially the rather pathetic thirty-page rant against the Church entitled "The Medieval Mind," is consistently shallow and cliched. That the author truly believes that 1,000 years of European history can possibly be summarized accurately in so few words should disqualify this book as a serious, scholarly "portrait of an age." In short, Manchester's view of the Medieval millenium as a time of unending brutishness, depravity, and intellectual stagnancy is as thoroughly unenlightened and pseudo-intellectual as the false "Middle Ages" which he describes.
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