3 ms·

I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to

I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to conform to a very strict worldview and reject pagan lies and frivolities. (This isn't necessarily a dig at Christianity itself, things were always a little different with lay intellectuals: but these kind of disappeared for a while, in the Latin West of course.) As I hinted at, the stuff that was lost was not some random antiquarian junk but books of well established, even then, usefulness for science/scholarship.

zozbot234 5y ago
What's the stuff that "would have been preserved" by the Classical world but was not preserved by the monasteries, and the existing tradition in general? Religious texts? We actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff, in the form of Classical philosophy. We may have lost much of the mass culture that was closely linked to pagan religion, but we can get the gist of it from what Christianity and other later religions managed to pick up - and even that was soon after transformed and improved in refinement beyond all recognition. The stuff simply wasn't as interesting as we sometimes suppose.
- stereolambda 5y ago
  There is an interesting, but very incomplete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_w... Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty. I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > which would be preserved if people were actually interested And this is the non-obvious point that the first part of OP disagreed with. Preserving and copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work. And there were few or no institutions explicitly devoted to that task - to the best of our knowledge, anyway - prior to the Christian monasteries. The Musaion and Library of Alexandria is described as exceptional simply because it did engage in some primitive version of that work, and even that was not considered important enough to be kept functional for more than a few centuries.
    - stereolambda 5y ago
      > copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work Not disputing that it was an expensive luxury thing, but let's not take it to the extreme that the ancients were helpless in that regard. Clearly they were able to preserve a number of titles throughout centuries, there were many books commonly read and cited. (Until they disappeared toward the late first millennium.) If some piece was really core and central to them, they generally managed not to lose it, just because of the need (again, not some abstract desire for preservation). If they stopped, it means that either they collectively lost interest in some swaths of intellectual activity, or lacked the means because of an economic and civilizational slump. In fact both those factors were likely at play here. The transition from scrolls to codices, that you are probably alluding to, was a force multiplier for this process.

zozbot234 5y ago

What's the stuff that "would have been preserved" by the Classical world but was not preserved by the monasteries, and the existing tradition in general? Religious texts? We actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff, in the form of Classical philosophy. We may have lost much of the mass culture that was closely linked to pagan religion, but we can get the gist of it from what Christianity and other later religions managed to pick up - and even that was soon after transformed and improved in refinement beyond all recognition. The stuff simply wasn't as interesting as we sometimes suppose.

stereolambda 5y ago
There is an interesting, but very incomplete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_w... Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty. I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > which would be preserved if people were actually interested And this is the non-obvious point that the first part of OP disagreed with. Preserving and copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work. And there were few or no institutions explicitly devoted to that task - to the best of our knowledge, anyway - prior to the Christian monasteries. The Musaion and Library of Alexandria is described as exceptional simply because it did engage in some primitive version of that work, and even that was not considered important enough to be kept functional for more than a few centuries.
  - stereolambda 5y ago
    > copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work Not disputing that it was an expensive luxury thing, but let's not take it to the extreme that the ancients were helpless in that regard. Clearly they were able to preserve a number of titles throughout centuries, there were many books commonly read and cited. (Until they disappeared toward the late first millennium.) If some piece was really core and central to them, they generally managed not to lose it, just because of the need (again, not some abstract desire for preservation). If they stopped, it means that either they collectively lost interest in some swaths of intellectual activity, or lacked the means because of an economic and civilizational slump. In fact both those factors were likely at play here. The transition from scrolls to codices, that you are probably alluding to, was a force multiplier for this process.