Twitter Project: Medieval and Renaissance Minds

I have established this blog to describe and announce a brief Twitter project I am experimenting with. I will be tweeting HERE (#awlobf) one sentence for every page of the bestseller A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by historian William Manchester from Thursday, January 7 at 9am through Monday, January 11 at 7pm.

Each Tweet is intended to be a pithy gloss of the take-away point of that page of the book. The tweets will be in order and each will begin with the page number it is associated with (1-296). The tweets will be published periodically between 9am and 7pm each day from Thursday January 7th though Monday January 11 (the date of the book club meeting). I will use SocialOomph to automate the tweets (HT HATProject).

Since the book deals with Medieval and Renaissance European history (14th-16th centuries), many of the tweets will inevitably reference religion, humanism, popes, powerful families, and great artists and thinkers. Some of this can be touchy subjects for some people. I assure you, I intend no offense.

I was inspired by two recent discoveries.

• One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick (HT Boing Boing) which is exactly what it says.
  

• HATProject (HT kottke) which "recreated the movie ‘Home Alone’ using 22 different twitter profiles collected into a single twitter list" in real time" (in synch with the movie's chronology).
  

I am reading this book for a Washington DC area book club, Books and Banter. I have no connection to the author of the book nor to the publisher. Like the HATProject folks, there's no money in this and I do it as an experimental use of Twitter and social networking.

From the Amazon.com review of the book:

It speaks to the failure of medieval Europe, writes popular historian William Manchester, that "in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent." European powers were so absorbed in destroying each other and in suppressing peasant revolts and religious reform that they never quite got around to realizing the possibilities of contemporary innovations in public health, civil engineering, and other peaceful pursuits. Instead, they waged war in faraway lands, created and lost fortunes, and squandered millions of lives. For all the wastefulness of medieval societies, however, Manchester notes, the era created the foundation for the extraordinary creative explosion of the Renaissance. Drawing on a cast of characters numbering in the hundreds, Manchester does a solid job of reconstructing the medieval world, although some scholars may disagree with his interpretations.

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