21–30 of 69 posts
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
they key to the article isn't the years covered but the fact that the Church wasn't suppressing knowledge which many people have an irrational inability to recognize.
The church wasn't suppressing ancient knowledge for the most part, but it wasn't exactly doing much to produce new knowledge, either. That didn't really get going (in Europe) until the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, although there was some progress in the late Middle Ages as the article points out. For the most part, the article is about preserving and recovering old knowledge. That the Renaissance had some p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
I did, I just disagree that we can discard a dark age just because some Universities were founded as soon as the eleventh century, Europe literacy levels wouldn't match the Roman ones until the 19th century. Also the Muslim world invented the scientific method centuries before the western world did. (Jābir ibn Hayyān)
There are no scientific advances in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, i.e. between 500AD to 1000AD, just a 'mere' 500+ years... This is actually acknowledged by the writer of the article. Things get somewhat better in the 2nd part of the Middle Ages leading to the Renaissance. So roughly 1000AD-1500AD. The earliest references from the author are in 12th century. Such an intellectually dishonest title.
There's a weird kind of historic revisionism that's been going on the last couple years regarding the Medieval period...the "things weren't all that bad" and "the notion that nothing happened is just a myth". Is it real? Are we just now learning about advanced and invention that happened during this period and were previously ignoring/ignorant of? Maybe. But I suspect something else is at play here, I'm just not sure…
For various values of "last couple", e.g., I remember at least one college history class I had around 1996 where the instructor spent some time (it was something of a tangent from the central focus of the class) discussing research (which I don't think was particularly new at the time, but something the instructor thought most students wouldn't be aware of) which seemed to refute the existence of a period of a lack of technological development in the Middle Ages in Europe. (Not that a lot of early-developed technology wasn't lost or at least less widely distributed, just that new developments continued despite that.)
Is this question implicitly restricting itself to European Middle ages? If not, surely it's worth mentioning the scientific advances in the Islamic Golden Ages? [1] As I understand it, these were so important that in Europe if you wanted to keep apace of scientific advances, many undertook to learn to read Arabic. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic...
So if we can agree that there was a medieval world or world system, then the old picture of a scientific dark age ceases to make much sense. At the same time that Western Europe was in a period of slowed technological innovation--the period just before Charlemagne, let's say--huge advances were occurring not only in places like modern-day Iraq, India and China, but even cities on the periphery of what we think of as medieval Europe, like Cordoba and Constantinople.
A couple more interesting takes on global premodern science and technology - Richard Bulliet's "The Camel and the Wheel" and Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China series, which I admittedly have only skimmed, but is really fascinating stuff.
The texts of the pagans were not preserved because they were revered but because it was the duty of a monk to know how to write. To learn how to write, you have to write. Since very little new work was being created, old work was copied by rote.
There are no scientific advances in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, i.e. between 500AD to 1000AD, just a 'mere' 500+ years... This is actually acknowledged by the writer of the article. Things get somewhat better in the 2nd part of the Middle Ages leading to the Renaissance. So roughly 1000AD-1500AD. The earliest references from the author are in 12th century. Such an intellectually dishonest title.
There's a weird kind of historic revisionism that's been going on the last couple years regarding the Medieval period...the "things weren't all that bad" and "the notion that nothing happened is just a myth". Is it real? Are we just now learning about advanced and invention that happened during this period and were previously ignoring/ignorant of? Maybe. But I suspect something else is at play here, I'm just not sure…
It seems reasonable to me to believe that life wasn't that bad even for a Christian peasant, assuming: good health, good weather, no plague, no war (to be conscripted in), ugly daughters (to avoid prima nocta). Sure, you didn't own anything but life was simple, food was good, the world was understandable (even if your understanding was primitive and wrong), and the countryside must have been beautiful to explore. Plus you had the remarkable benefit of dreaming about truly foreign and far-away places, like Africa, India or China. Even countries within Europe were so distinct from each other as to make travel a real adventure.
There's an interesting take on going back to something like this in Paolo Bacigalupi's _The Windup Girl_[1]. The world has undergone a "Contraction" and oil is incredibly scarce. Travel is difficult and expensive; the world has grown large again, and human and animal power are once again the staples (although military and governments still use oil for some things).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "Middle Ages" refers to the period starting with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and ending with the discovery of America. So 5th to 15th century. So conveniently redefining Middle Ages to start in the 12th century to make a point is not particularly honest. There was no scientific progress for more than half of the period commonly known as "Middle Ages" in Western Europe. That's a fact not disputed by t…
"ending with the discovery of America"... I don't know what you learned in school, but the end of middle ages had nothing to do with America. What caused the end of the middle ages was the cultural renaissance of Europe. By the time America was discovered, the middle ages were finished for a few decades at least.
The Renaissance in Italy started well before the usual end date for the Middle Ages. There's a lot of things that motivate the dating of the end of the Middle Ages -- the discovery of the New World, the spread of the Renaissance to much of Europe, the completion of the reconquista, and a number of other things contribute.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
I did, I just disagree that we can discard a dark age just because some Universities were founded as soon as the eleventh century, Europe literacy levels wouldn't match the Roman ones until the 19th century. Also the Muslim world invented the scientific method centuries before the western world did. (Jābir ibn Hayyān)
I'm by no means a medieval scholar. But this doesn't mesh at all with the information in the"The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt (a national book award winner). The texts of the pagans were not preserved because they were revered but because it was the duty of a monk to know how to write. To learn how to write, you have to write. Since very little new work was being created, old work was copied by rote.
Humanistic learning did stagnate in some ways in the post-Roman, pre-Renaissance period. Many Greek texts were lost or were only known via garbled translations from the Arabic. Works like "De Rerum Naturae" (Greenblatt's subject) were scientifically significant so there is a bit of overlap between this loss of humanistic, bibliographic learning and scientific and technological achievement. But the two things aren't co-equivalent. The same 12th century European culture that had no idea what De Rerum Naturae was innovating in all sorts of technological ways, from creating new types of wind and water mills to developing new forms of financial funding (in fact the word "company" dates to the 12th century - it originally related to trade guilds that pooled their money to build water mills and the like). So a great deal of new "work" was being created - the question is how posterity judges the value of that work. Renaissance humanists tended to care more about Greek grammar than about mining technology and windmills, so they created this narrative of medieval backwardness that we're still beguiled by.