14 ms·

Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages?

97 points by i04n 12y ago

devindotcom 12y ago
It's an understandable mistake, since we tend to view history with a sort of flattening perspective; the recent past is spread out before us in sparkling detail, then fields marching away we spy the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, the renaissance — but beyond that, as records are fewer and the major changes coming at longer intervals, history essentially disappears beyond the curvature of the landscape, and the horizon marks the moment when our understanding lapses, and time compresses, robbing centuries of their weight and duration. Beyond that are the rolling hills of the late roman empire and the stern peaks of the classical era, clearly visible but isolated. 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.
scoj 12y ago
That is a terrific answer. Our understanding of history and especially the 'rewriting of history' never ceases to amaze me. I read a history of Christianity book several years ago, and found it fascinating and inspiring.
akkartik 12y ago
I had my opinion of the christian church dramatically overhauled a few years ago, paradoxically by a great scifi novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
- ggreer 12y ago
  Funny, I had the opposite reaction when reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. There's one scene near the end where a refugee mother and baby are dying. They are crippled, burned, and suffering radiation poisoning. Both are in great pain, and the mother wants euthanasia for herself and her baby. A priest first tries (and almost succeeds) to talk her out of it. He then resorts to force, trying to kidnap the baby and eventually punching a doctor. When stymied by police, he is let off with a warning instead of being jailed. 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.
  - akkartik 12y ago
    I thought the point was to show a full cycle, from collapse to collapse. In times of collapse the church was useful in preserving knowledge and supporting the spirit. In times of hubris (ie just before collapse) it subsides to dogma. We don't know how to separate the benefits from the dogma. At least that was my interpretation..
  - fractallyte 12y ago
    Walter Miller was a firm Catholic, and thus was opposed to the idea of suicide or euthanasia. * 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.
- dnr 12y ago
  If you like that, you might love The Glass Bead Game. It also made me think differently about the Church (and many other things), and includes similar themes of collapse and stability.
- wlievens 12y ago
  You'd probably enjoy Anathem by Neil Stephenson in that case.
pacofvf 12y ago
Indeed, maybe there was no scientific dark age in the Middle ages, at least not globally, but It was a dark age in Europe, knowledge was lost, the (roman) world economy collapsed and entirely disappeared, economic throughput and population would not recover until the industrial revolution[1]. The dark age ended when the last remaining of the ancient Roman world was forcibly dispersed from Constantinople, most of it found a safe harbor in Italian cities that would become the center of the Renaissance.[2] [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
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - pacofvf 12y ago
    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)
    - thibauts 12y ago
      I tend to agree though saying Jabir ibn Hayyan invented the scientific method might be a bit of an overstatement. Which doesn't make him a less fascinating figure by any mean.
    - benbreen 12y ago
      That bit about literacy doesn't strike me as accurate. Granted, it's almost impossible to measure historical literacy so anyone debating it is dealing in very broad strokes, but literacy rates in western Europe are thought to have been pretty high by the 16th century - perhaps around 60 to 70% of men and 20 to 50% of women. I have a hard time believing that the population within the borders of the Roman Empire would match those percentages, or indeed that there are accurate ways to measure the literacy of such a huge swathe of the ancient world. (Remember, by "within Roman borders" we're talking about enslaved salt miners in Turkey, North African berber shepherds, Scottish borderlands raiders, Visigothic tribespeople and all sorts of other groups beyond the inhabitants of the city of Rome and the Italian peninsula.) Narrowing it down to "Roman citizens" would yield a very different and much higher literacy percentage, but that'd be cherry-picking.
jackjeff 12y ago
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.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  The article answers a question about the middle ages. No dishonesty there. 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.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    The Dark Age is generally terminated at 800, with Charlemagne assuming the title of Emperor in the West. So the point that most of the Middle Ages (800 - 1200) saw relatively little scientific progress is not entirely wrong, although the article's point that the foundations of modern science were laid in the High Middle Ages (1200 - 1380) is well taken.
  - jackjeff 12y ago
    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 the article. Addendum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages Middle Ages period is 5th to 15th century.
    - 12y ago
Tloewald 12y ago
One quibble — the author credits Boethius with having attempted to translate the works of Aristotle, but having died before he could complete the project. But he did finish the stuff on logic. The author refers to this as "luck" but shouldn't we give a little credit to a Dark Ages philosopher who chose to make his life's work the translation of Aristotle? Starting with logic was almost certainly not luck.
- rwl 12y ago
  Indeed, it wasn't. In fact, Aristotle's logical works (the "organon") have been recommended as the entry point into his philosophy since antiquity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organon
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Curious - why a 'life's work'? Wouldn't it have taken a few months?
  - huxley 12y ago
    Note: IANA medieval scholar nor particularly versed in medieval translation, but here would be my explanation: 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.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
In fairness, most of the progress the article is talking about happened in the High or Late Middle Ages. The period from 800 to 1200 was considerably less fecund, so the "myth" isn't entirely false: the early Middle Ages were pretty barren, scientifically speaking. 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-Middle/dp/0140045147/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410818839&sr=8-1&keywords=the+medieval+machine http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine-Industrial-Revolution...
willvarfar 12y ago
All I get is a login signup paywall thingy. 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?
- rpenm 12y ago
  A response to a similar question on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Tom-Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Patience-with-Quora https://www.quora.com/Tom-Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Pat...): 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.
- rpenm 12y ago
  Appending ?share=1 to a Quora URL should let you view it without logging in.
torrance 12y ago
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_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic...
- benbreen 12y ago
  This is a cogent question and one that historians of science are currently debating. There's been a lot of debate in my own field (early modern history) about whether we can speak of such things as "early modern Japan," "early modern India" or indeed an "early modern world," or whether we should restrict the term to Europe. I personally vote for the former on the basis of the globalization that had been occurring since the Pax Mongolica. (A few book recs on this would include Janet Abu-Lughod, "Before European Hegemony," and the third book of Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism" series). 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.
  - selimthegrim 12y ago
    If you read George Steiner on Needham, it's interesting to see that he ended up identifying with China to a point that he even parroted their line in the Vietnam War uncritically.
b1tr0t 12y ago
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.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Stephen Greenblatt is a great scholar but "The Swerve" is a deeply problematic book. At any rate, the comments in this thread are conflating two very different things: 1) humanistic learning, particularly Greek scholarship and 2) technological and scientific innovation writ large. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >Since very little new work was being created, old work was copied by rote. // 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.
michaelsbradley 12y ago
A friend of mine recently published a related article: Scientific Geniuses and Their Jesuit Collaborators http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-jesuit-collaborators/ http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-...
vorg 12y ago
> In the Third Century, however, there were major social and political upheavals that interrupted many aspects of Roman life, including scholarship 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?
- ricree 12y ago
  >The 3rd century is also when the Chinese Han Dynasty fell 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.
louisdefunes 12y ago
Is Quora the new way to publish papers?
arjn 12y ago
The middle ages were a period of great turmoil in Europe, so even if there were scientific, literary or artistic advances they could easily have been destroyed. We only know what we know from stuff that has survived the turmoil and the following thousand or so years. Also, I'm very surprised the quora article did not even mention the plague and the effect it had in those days.
fiatjaf 12y ago
There isn't a way to measure scientific progress.
dallos 12y ago
You should ask Giordano Bruno about the "anti-catholic prejudice".
sanoli 12y ago
Great BBC TV series from 1969, based on the book with same title: Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA

97 points by i04n 12y ago

It's an understandable mistake, since we tend to view history with a sort of flattening perspective; the recent past is spread out before us in sparkling detail, then fields marching away we spy the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, the renaissance — but beyond that, as records are fewer and the major changes coming at longer intervals, history essentially disappears beyond the curvature of the landscape, and the horizon marks the moment when our understanding lapses, and time compresses, robbing centuries of their weight and duration. Beyond that are the rolling hills of the late roman empire and the stern peaks of the classical era, clearly visible but isolated. 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.

scoj 12y ago

That is a terrific answer. Our understanding of history and especially the 'rewriting of history' never ceases to amaze me. I read a history of Christianity book several years ago, and found it fascinating and inspiring.

akkartik 12y ago

I had my opinion of the christian church dramatically overhauled a few years ago, paradoxically by a great scifi novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

ggreer 12y ago
Funny, I had the opposite reaction when reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. There's one scene near the end where a refugee mother and baby are dying. They are crippled, burned, and suffering radiation poisoning. Both are in great pain, and the mother wants euthanasia for herself and her baby. A priest first tries (and almost succeeds) to talk her out of it. He then resorts to force, trying to kidnap the baby and eventually punching a doctor. When stymied by police, he is let off with a warning instead of being jailed. 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.
- akkartik 12y ago
  I thought the point was to show a full cycle, from collapse to collapse. In times of collapse the church was useful in preserving knowledge and supporting the spirit. In times of hubris (ie just before collapse) it subsides to dogma. We don't know how to separate the benefits from the dogma. At least that was my interpretation..
- fractallyte 12y ago
  Walter Miller was a firm Catholic, and thus was opposed to the idea of suicide or euthanasia. * 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.
dnr 12y ago
If you like that, you might love The Glass Bead Game. It also made me think differently about the Church (and many other things), and includes similar themes of collapse and stability.
wlievens 12y ago
You'd probably enjoy Anathem by Neil Stephenson in that case.

pacofvf 12y ago

Indeed, maybe there was no scientific dark age in the Middle ages, at least not globally, but It was a dark age in Europe, knowledge was lost, the (roman) world economy collapsed and entirely disappeared, economic throughput and population would not recover until the industrial revolution[1]. The dark age ended when the last remaining of the ancient Roman world was forcibly dispersed from Constantinople, most of it found a safe harbor in Italian cities that would become the center of the Renaissance.[2] [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

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- pacofvf 12y ago
  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)
  - thibauts 12y ago
    I tend to agree though saying Jabir ibn Hayyan invented the scientific method might be a bit of an overstatement. Which doesn't make him a less fascinating figure by any mean.
  - benbreen 12y ago
    That bit about literacy doesn't strike me as accurate. Granted, it's almost impossible to measure historical literacy so anyone debating it is dealing in very broad strokes, but literacy rates in western Europe are thought to have been pretty high by the 16th century - perhaps around 60 to 70% of men and 20 to 50% of women. I have a hard time believing that the population within the borders of the Roman Empire would match those percentages, or indeed that there are accurate ways to measure the literacy of such a huge swathe of the ancient world. (Remember, by "within Roman borders" we're talking about enslaved salt miners in Turkey, North African berber shepherds, Scottish borderlands raiders, Visigothic tribespeople and all sorts of other groups beyond the inhabitants of the city of Rome and the Italian peninsula.) Narrowing it down to "Roman citizens" would yield a very different and much higher literacy percentage, but that'd be cherry-picking.

jackjeff 12y ago

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.

Tloewald 12y ago
The article answers a question about the middle ages. No dishonesty there. 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.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  The Dark Age is generally terminated at 800, with Charlemagne assuming the title of Emperor in the West. So the point that most of the Middle Ages (800 - 1200) saw relatively little scientific progress is not entirely wrong, although the article's point that the foundations of modern science were laid in the High Middle Ages (1200 - 1380) is well taken.
- jackjeff 12y ago
  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 the article. Addendum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages Middle Ages period is 5th to 15th century.
  - 12y ago

Tloewald 12y ago

One quibble — the author credits Boethius with having attempted to translate the works of Aristotle, but having died before he could complete the project. But he did finish the stuff on logic. The author refers to this as "luck" but shouldn't we give a little credit to a Dark Ages philosopher who chose to make his life's work the translation of Aristotle? Starting with logic was almost certainly not luck.

rwl 12y ago
Indeed, it wasn't. In fact, Aristotle's logical works (the "organon") have been recommended as the entry point into his philosophy since antiquity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organon
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Curious - why a 'life's work'? Wouldn't it have taken a few months?
- huxley 12y ago
  Note: IANA medieval scholar nor particularly versed in medieval translation, but here would be my explanation: 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.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

In fairness, most of the progress the article is talking about happened in the High or Late Middle Ages. The period from 800 to 1200 was considerably less fecund, so the "myth" isn't entirely false: the early Middle Ages were pretty barren, scientifically speaking. 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-Middle/dp/0140045147/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410818839&sr=8-1&keywords=the+medieval+machine http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine-Industrial-Revolution...

willvarfar 12y ago

All I get is a login signup paywall thingy. 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?

rpenm 12y ago
A response to a similar question on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Tom-Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Patience-with-Quora https://www.quora.com/Tom-Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Pat...): 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.
rpenm 12y ago
Appending ?share=1 to a Quora URL should let you view it without logging in.

torrance 12y ago

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_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic...

benbreen 12y ago
This is a cogent question and one that historians of science are currently debating. There's been a lot of debate in my own field (early modern history) about whether we can speak of such things as "early modern Japan," "early modern India" or indeed an "early modern world," or whether we should restrict the term to Europe. I personally vote for the former on the basis of the globalization that had been occurring since the Pax Mongolica. (A few book recs on this would include Janet Abu-Lughod, "Before European Hegemony," and the third book of Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism" series). 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.
- selimthegrim 12y ago
  If you read George Steiner on Needham, it's interesting to see that he ended up identifying with China to a point that he even parroted their line in the Vietnam War uncritically.

b1tr0t 12y ago

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.

benbreen 12y ago
Stephen Greenblatt is a great scholar but "The Swerve" is a deeply problematic book. At any rate, the comments in this thread are conflating two very different things: 1) humanistic learning, particularly Greek scholarship and 2) technological and scientific innovation writ large. 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.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>Since very little new work was being created, old work was copied by rote. // 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.

michaelsbradley 12y ago

A friend of mine recently published a related article: Scientific Geniuses and Their Jesuit Collaborators http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-jesuit-collaborators/ http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-...

vorg 12y ago

> In the Third Century, however, there were major social and political upheavals that interrupted many aspects of Roman life, including scholarship 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?

ricree 12y ago
>The 3rd century is also when the Chinese Han Dynasty fell 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.

louisdefunes 12y ago

Is Quora the new way to publish papers?

arjn 12y ago

The middle ages were a period of great turmoil in Europe, so even if there were scientific, literary or artistic advances they could easily have been destroyed. We only know what we know from stuff that has survived the turmoil and the following thousand or so years. Also, I'm very surprised the quora article did not even mention the plague and the effect it had in those days.

fiatjaf 12y ago

There isn't a way to measure scientific progress.

dallos 12y ago

You should ask Giordano Bruno about the "anti-catholic prejudice".

sanoli 12y ago

Great BBC TV series from 1969, based on the book with same title: Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA