jeffevnz

It's when the Europeans started pulling away from their religion that they started to get interesting. I wouldn't say the Hebrew religious culture (I assume you're referring to Christianity) forms the basis of western culture, since those parts of Western civilization that have any merit are those that are independent the religious tradition.

Antipope Innocent II

Yeah, well I have a bit of a problem with people getting their history from scientists, even if they are very good scientists and very entertaining writers. Carl Sagan also told me in Cosmos that the wicked Christians burnt down the Great Library of Alexandria and if they hadn't we'd all be living on Mars now or something. And I believed him for years until I checked the sources and found Dr Carl should have stuck to astronomy.

The "quest to regain the knowledge of the ancients" began in the Twelfth Century, not the Renaissance. Compared to the mass of formerly lost texts the Medieval Scholars of the Twelfth Century recovered via the Muslims and Jews of Spain, the ones rediscovered in the Renaissance were few and of little significance.

"Scholasticism" didn't water anything down. Its problem, as I said, was that it treated the ancient authorities with too much respect - putting them on the same pedastel as the Bible and saying that "if Aristotle said it then it must be true, because who are we to question the ancients?" Things about which the ancients were obviously wrong, like the idea that the equator was impassable, were abandoned very reluctantly or not at all.

What changed in the Renaissance was the inferiority complex that caused Medieval thinkers to ask "who are we to question the ancients?" The new mindset said "We are the equals of the ancients!", which broke the stranglehold these moribund ancient "authorities" had on learning, alllowed radical thinking by guys like Copernicus and Gallileo and ushered in experiemental science and the real scientific revolution.

There had been earlier thinnking outside the box of ancient "authority" - Nicholas Oresme had proposed that the Earth revolves back in the Fourteenth Century and Jean Buridan questioned Aristotle's physics and came up with the concept of inertia, anticipating Newton by several centuries.

But on the whole it wasn't Medieval science's disregard for the ancients that ended up holding it back, it was its over-reverence for them.

Pay attention to Gould on palaentology - his detailed grasp of history was pretty shaky.

Roger Pearse

I've not followed the thread, so I am wary of getting the wrong end of a discussion. But, standing alone, this comment caught my eye, as I am interested in the transmission of texts from antiquity and the process whereby they became known again.

These ideas are all open to discussion, as I'm sure you recognise, and depend on where we stand and what is important to us. I'm not sure that I quite agree.

In the 9th century, for instance, we have scholars going around gathering texts at the behest of Charlemagne, or in the climate created by his interest. Lupus of Ferrieres is the most obvious example. The 12th century flourishing is another instance of these renewals.

But these are all merely shadows of the explosion of learning and discovery and renewal that takes place with Petrarch in the 14th and proceeding in Florence in the 15th. A list of literary texts recovered and circulated, of manuscripts written alone would demonstrate this. Part of this is the existence of a world that was so much more wealthy than either of the preceeding periods, of course, and thus the conditions for humanism.

I don't know whether you have in mind specific texts when you say that the recovery of texts in the 12th century via Spain dwarfs that of the Renaisance. However as a rule I would venture to disagree. Medieval library catalogues do not support this comparison across the board, I think (which is not to say that there was not a very important flow of technical and philosophical knowledge at that point).

If nothing else, the knowledge of Greek was essential to dispose of Greek learning, and this was not very widespread prior to the Renaisance, even if we think of people like Robert Grosseteste; these are exceptions, compared with the numbers who (e.g.) heard Chrysoloras teaching in Florence in the Renaisance.

Vast amounts of literature remained unknown, and it is at the Renaisance that book-hunters like Poggio can exist, can command the resources of wealthy patrons, and can unearth the majority of texts now known to us; and it is the editions of the late 15-early 16th century that transmit to us nearly all of the classical heritage. Consider that the texts of Monte Cassino remained unknown and did not circulate until that period. Think of both halves of Tacitus' Annals, neither of which has children in number until that period. Or we could think of Livy.

So some qualification would be needed on the above, I think.

True.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Antipope Innocent II

Those earlier revivals (eg the Carolingian, Ottonian and Alfredian) were mentioned earlier in this discussion or on the "Medieval Flat Earth" thread. I forget which.

My understanding is that the Renaissance saw a greater propogation of may works (thanks to the printing press) and that the revival of Greek learning and greater access to Greek texts directly rather than via Latin translations of Arabic or Hebrew brought a better understanding of them, but that the number of philosophical, scientific and technical works which found their way to Europe for the first time in the Sixteenth Century was quite small compared to the Twelfth Century Renaissance. If you have access to lists of what texts appeared in Europe for the first time and when which backs up what you say I'm happy to stand corrected.

As I've said above and elsewhere in this thread, that was one change that happened in the Renaissance. Greek literacy had been all but non-existent in the Middle Ages with a few isolated exceptions.

See above about greater propogation. The texts of Monte Cassino can't fall into the definition of "works unknown in the West" even if they were "works unknown outside of Monte Cassino's library".

But as I said, I'm happy to stand corrected. And remember that we are talking philosophical, scientific and technical works here, so Tacitus and Livy aren't actually relevant.

cajela

Thanks Antipope. I'm really enjoying lurking here.

James Hannam

I see this thread has grown and I’m not going to be able to comment on everything on it. In particular, Brother Daniel, your follow up at the end of page four is not something I can answer in less than 100,000 words, which happens to be the length of my book. I will reply about stone buildings here and Leonardo when I get the books I want to use.

Saxons and Vikings were both primarily carpenters and almost all there buildings were of wood. I said this was a choice because wood was cheap and available, but they could use stone if they needed to. The best way to prove this is to look at where they did build with stone and ask why. For instance, Escomb church, in Northumberland is 7th century and stone. However, we find that the stone was taken from a nearby Roman building including an archway that was re-erected. Thus the easy availability of stone meant the Saxons were happy to use it. In locations without trees, stone was also used. I’ve visited the ancient village of Chysauster in Cornwall which is situated on a treeless moor. It is probably pre-Saxon and even pre-Roman. Likewise, on Shetland, lack of wood forced the Vikings to build in stone producing the best preserved settlement in the UK at Jarslhof. Stone has been used to build houses in Shetland and Orkney for 5000 years because that was the material available.

On the 12th century v the 15th century renaissances, I would echo the Antipope by pointing out that in the field of science and maths, the earlier period was much the more significant. Some texts did only arrive later, mainly Ptolemy’s Geography and Apolonius’s Conics but the vast majority were translated before 1250 or so. This includes the Almagest, all of Aristotle, much of his Arab commentary, and Euclid. In medicine, though, most of Galen was unknown until the fifteenth century with the Latin printed edition being the first occasion much of it was translated.

On the heavy plough, I’ve amended my chapter as it did look like I was implying that it was invented in 10th century Britain, which is obviously untrue. Pliny mentions them being used in a corner of Asia Minor in the 1st century. But they were not adopted widely, like mills and other gadgets until after the fall of the western empire.

Best wishes

James (pka Bede)

Read the first chapter of God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science FREE

Antipope Innocent II

Enough of it was known for it to form the basis of all Medieval anatomy and to stimulate the revival of human dissection in Medieval universities - finally overcoming the Greek and Roman taboo against dissection that had held the study of anatomy back for centuries. Gerard of Cremona translated at least three of Galen's works in the late Eleventh Century.

You might need to check that detail as well. Both Pliny and Servius mention some form of wheeled plough which seems to imply a heavy, mould-board plough of the Medieval type. But Pliny's reference was to this plough being used in Raetia and Servius' is to northern Italy, not Asia Minor. Paul Gans' Medieval Technology website repeats this idea that Pliny's reference was to Asia Minor, but I have no idea why he says this (I have a vague memory that he gets this detail from White). This error was pointed out to him back in 1998 but it's still uncorrected on his site. It would be a good idea not to repeat that error in your book.

The Pliny reference is in his Natural History (18.171-173). For more details on the Roman use of heavy ploughs you might want to check out John Percival, The Roman Villa (Batsford, 1976) pp. 114-117, Peter Salway, Roman Britain (Clarendon Press, 1981) pp. 622-3 and Ken and Petra Dark, The Landscape of Roman Britain (Sutton Publishing, 1997) pp. 101-103.

Since your book is inevitably going to be attacked by the usual rabid, fundie anti-Christians we want to make sure we don't leave them any legitimate toeholds.

James Hannam

Lol. Guess where I got the location from? Gans otherwise seems to know his stuff.

Best wishes

James

Clivedurdle

Where exactly did the knowledge come from in the twelth and thirteenth centuries - Muslim Spain or a result of the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders with the involvement of Venice?
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=214655
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=218109

James Hannam

The texts came from both Greek and Arab sources. A big source was Sicily which was under Byzantine rule until about the ninth century (?), then Arab and then Norman. I've actually never heard that the 1205 sack of Constantinople did much to spread Greek texts, it more likely destroyed a lot of them. However, Latin rule of the Eastern Empire did mean western clerics travelled there and some, like William of Moerbeke, translated texts into Latin. He eventually became Bishop of Corinth.

Best wishs

James