That said, one of the (many) things that makes us tend to underplay the scientific progress made even in the Late Middle Ages was the disconnect between science and technology. In modern science, from Newton's time onward, the two have been closely coupled (with technology leading the way to new science as often as the other way around).
In the Middle Ages, technology developed more-or-less independently of science, often with quite astonishing results. An excellent book on the subject if Jean Gimpel's "The Medieval Machine", although the solemn declaration of the end of Western technological power makes the preface pretty hilarious reading, 35 years on: http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine-Industrial-Revolution...
A medieval translator tackling Aristotle would face several challenges, some insurmountable, but Boethius had many unique advantages.
Boethius was one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the Latin Empire (the "magister officiorum"), so he had the influence and access to manuscripts that few others could match. He was classically trained in his youth and could speak, read and write in both classical Greek and Latin, a skill that was becoming rare among his contemporaries, a good thing for him but also a problem since there weren't many colleagues he could confer with.
If a word or phrase was unfamiliar --and in a technical work like Aristotle's there could be plenty of vocabulary that wasn't common-- Boethius would need to research and document it. That wasn't as simple as it would be today, there were no real dictionaries or reference books to assist in translation. So he would have to access other manuscripts, which might involve a painstaking copying process by hand, travel over large distances, and other numerous challenges the modern translator rarely needs to face. Fortunately Boethius had the power, influence and wealth to do this.
Making things even more difficult is that the Aristotelian corpus was fragmentary even in Boethius' time, much of what survives from Aristotle aren't anything close to completed manuscripts but more like class notes, compiled and edited by students and later scholars. This meant that Boethius wasn't able to do just a word-for-word translation or a paraphrase, he needed to analyze and comment on each section so that nuances weren't lost. Without a large body of existing scholarship, Boethius had to do a lot of the work on his own.
Given that translation wasn't his day job, each document could take years or even decades of work.
I'm pretty sure that scene was supposed to make the reader feel sympathetic towards the priest. Instead, I felt disappointment toward the author.
The preservation of knowledge across civilizational collapses was neat, and the writing was good, but I would have enjoyed the story more if it had been about a less dogmatic order.
* SPOILER *
Later, as the priest lay dying himself, again the moral argument was raised; but this time (with the reader identifying more closely with the protagonist) Miller wrote eloquently about the importance of 'natural' death.
I didn't necessarily agree with his point of view while I was reading it, but (like the best science fiction) it became something I thought deeply about for a long time afterwards.
This also reflects a very Western-centric point of view, for a great deal of reasons; the massive changes and wars wrought in the east, as Creasy writes, "appear before us through the twilight of primaeval history, dim and indistinct, but massive and majestic, like mountains in the early dawn." It doesn't quite tally with my other metaphor, but feels true nonetheless.
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.
[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.
Scientific Geniuses and Their Jesuit Collaborators
http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-...
I read a history of Christianity book several years ago, and found it fascinating and inspiring.
Yes I would like to know about this article.
No I would not like to sign up to yet another web site.
Why do people use quora again? It can't be out of loyalty to YC surely?
We require that people join because many of those who join like the service and end up contributing back to Quora, which makes it better for everyone. People spend a ton of time making Quora great by sharing their knowledge on here, so we think it is reasonable to ask that others who want to get to all the free knowledge here take the first very small step toward contributing back which is creating an account. That is the only reason we have the policy: to get more people to join who will share more knowledge and make Quora even better for everyone in the long run.
The community at Quora is pretty good, so they seem to know what they're doing.
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.
This argument appears thin - there would surely be enough text in the Holy Bible and the epistles and other writings of the early Church (eg Eusebius) for the monks to write extensively without needing any other material.
The 3rd century is also when the Chinese Han Dynasty fell, and was replaced by the "Three Kingdoms" (220 AD - 280 AD), a time of constant war and many deaths. Were the synchronized downfalls related somehow, perhaps shared diseases?
> The Christian church came to hold political power when the decline in learning in the west had been under way for over a century
The same happened in China from c.300 AD to 600 AD when Buddhism spread (although the textbooks tend to list lots of little kingdoms and emperors for that time). The Tang and Song dynasties (including the Sui and empress Wu) then took over and completed many engineering projects over the next 700 yrs. Why did the Chinese "Middle Ages" last for a much shorter time than the Western European?
And the Parthian empire, for that matter. At around the same time (the early 220s). An interesting timing for the three of them, although the worst of Rome's troubles didn't take place until decades later.
Not to mention how much the more aggressive Sassanid empire that followed the Parthians added pressure to the already troubled Roman state. Certainly, the Sassanid invasions played a very large part in Rome's own three way split from about 260-274.
[1] Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization
[2] Brownworth, Lars. Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization
Also, I'm very surprised the quora article did not even mention the plague and the effect it had in those days.
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark
On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA
The LINK title starts with "Middle Ages". The author points out that while the Dark Ages (500-1000) were indeed dark, the Middle Ages weren't, and that the Church, far from suppressing early scientific investigation nurtured it. If the link title omitted the first two words it might be accused of dishonestly, but since it does not, it's your reading comprehension that's the problem.
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 the article.
Addendum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages Middle Ages period is 5th to 15th century.
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 what.
man, if that doesn't make me sound like a conspiracy theorist
I mean, we actually know that not only was there pitifully little scientific advancement during that period (especially as you point out in the first half), but that science and technology regressed massively and entire fields were completely forgotten. For example, there was a gap of over a thousand years before anybody could build large domes again, and even then it had to be completely reinvented.
The loss of knowledge was vast and unprecedented in history. I've heard it said that Western Europe almost reverted back out of the Iron Age the loss of information was so great.
What's triggering all this revisionism? Again, I don't know, but sources like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hwrSE5DZrQ
list all things that happened in the later periods.
Even if you just blame the first 500 years, that's a loong time where not much of anything interesting happened.
One can only imagine were we would be, if we had not forgotten printed type by 2500BC[4] or small gear mechanisms by 100 BC [5]
Non "Dark-ages" years are less than the "dark ages" years in recorded history, we just like to think that civilization improves over time.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse [2] http://traveltoeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/wpid- [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples Photo-Apr-1-2013-151-PM.jpg [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
It would be like finding the monolith from 2001 on the moon.
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.)
http://www.amazon.com/Timeline-Michael-Crichton/dp/034541762...
And I doubt he came up with the idea. I also think I heard that this debate has been going on in medieval scholarship for a while.
That said, the debate is unlikely to be a strawman that glosses over the very real collapse in certain types of knowledge. I doubt the scholarly debate explains whatever is currently happening on the popular level.
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).
Like a few commenters here, you're confusing the dark ages and the middle ages. You can quibble over semantics and say that the middle ages includes the dark ages, but that obscures the point of the original post.
The standard narrative of Western intellectual progress looks like this:
~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture
~400AD to ~1500AD: Europe under the dominion of the Church, science and reason suppressed
~1500AD: bam, Renaissance
~1700AD: bam, Enlightenment
~1700AD - present: humanity freed from the yoke of religion, knowledge flowers again.
The revisionist view is as follows:
~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture
~400AD to ~1000AD: Europe in the dark ages due to barbarian invasions, underpopulated and poor, classical tradition barely kept alive in monasteries
~1000AD to ~1400AD: Europe begins to get wealthier, knowledge flowers in Church-sponsored universities
~1600AD: bam, Protestant Reformation
~1600AD - present: science builds on knowledge and philosophy developed by Catholic church, but Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda creates the false narrative of Church suppression of knowledge.
I don't know why this perspective is hitting the zeitgeist now, but one reason might be that the internet enables niche communities to share such ideas.
One such group is Catholics - here's a Catholic blogger explaining exactly how the heliocentrism vs geocentrism debate played out: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Another group are environmentalists - here's an interesting blogger writing about how classical knowledge was preserved through the dark ages: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/merlins-ti...
And a final group are the reactionaries, a group who see the modern ideals of progress as a myth - here's a good starting point on the idea that modern 'progressive' ideas are largely derived from Protestantism: http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-...
Anyone who's interested and has the free time, please do dig around those blogs - you may realise, as I did, that the 21st century is quite an intellectually narrow and ignorant time.
We changed the title to that of the page itself, which obviously doesn't make the claim you're objecting to. Surprised we didn't do it earlier.
For the most part, the article is about preserving and recovering old knowledge. That the Renaissance had some precedent in the late Middle Ages is not exactly new, but it does tend to be forgotten in simplified accounts.
There are plenty.
Ironically, building a medieval cathedral is one of those analogues. Yes, we can build a cathedral with modern equipment, but we don't know how much of it was done without it. Much of the knowledge was considered too commonplace to be worth writing down.
A modern one ... how about a Saturn V rocket. We no longer have the steel mills with big enough tooling in order to actually build such a mammoth beast. We would have to reinvent much of that tooling in order to do it again.
In any event, the writer of the original piece shows that significant advancement occurred during SOME of the middle ages, so my original point stands.
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.
For those downvoting the parent comment because of the final sentence – Crichton actually did do that. It was highly unusual.
Crichton does have a point that computers models are not valid replacements for repeatable, empirical testing of hypotheses.
But then he went far, far past what his skeptical attitude supports empirically. He flipped from "we can't prove the anthropocene hypothesis is true" to "it's very false, and funded by a conspiracy of enviro-nuts".
The original comment implied that along with denying climate change he's also like, an anti-vaxxer, a creationist, or a flat-earther.
This speech is the other notable place Crichton made specific scientific comments. It's possible he's wrong about some of his claims, but he approaches them from the point of view of a rationalist: