Antipope Innocent II

We have to be careful with our terminology here. By "Dark Ages" we're talking about the Early Middle Ages, ie 500-1000 AD. James is arguing they weren't as "dark" as is often made out. I agree, more or less, but with heavy cautions around the danger of over-emphasising this to the point of revisionism which distorts things in the opposite direction. They were definitely "dark" compared to what went before.

But if you extend "dark ages" to the whole of the Medieval period (including the High Medieval era of the cathedrals) then I would argue that they were increasingly less and less "dark" and, in fact, "lighter" than "a continuation of classical culture" in many significant respects.

No arguments there. And there were many other advances as well. As I mentioned before, water-power led to other advances. A water-powered bellows and water-powered trip hammers coupled with blast furnaces all mean that a medieval smith could produce large quatities of high quality steel that was beyond the wildest dreams of an Iron Age Roman metal worker with a slave-powered bellows and a hammer in his hand. The result is mass-produced steel armour for the plebs and the highest quality steel armour ever produced for the nobles. It would take another medieval invention (hand guns) and few centuries of refinement to see medieval-style plate armour made redundant.

And once they got the hang of mechanising things they tried to do it with as many boring or difficult tasks as possible. Like cooking meat on a spit. Instead of having someone sitting by the roasting fire turning spits for hours, they freed up his labour by connecting the spits to a gearing mechanism attached to revolving fans in the kitchen chimneys. The constant updraft of hot air from the kitchen fires turned the fans and the gearing could be adjusted to vary the speed at which the meat turned. Chimneys were another Medieval innovation - far better than a smokey brazier and a lot cheaper and more energy efficient than a hypocaust system.

And the medieval experiments with the mechanisation of time keeping and book production resulted in the clock and the printing press - two medieval inventions which revolutionised the whole world. Yet people call the Middle Ages a "dark age"? :huh:

In terms of "complexity", the Colosseum wasn't actually more complex than, say, Chartres Cathedral. The masons and architects who built Chartres or Notre Dame has the technical skill to build a Colosseum (if someone had the cash and the movitation to build such a thing - more on that in a moment), but the Colosseum's architects and masons were incapable of the technical skills to build Chartres. They simply couldn't make stone do the things Medieval masons had discovered.

In terms of scale, however, the Colosseum is bigger than any Medieval project I can think of. And your point about the speed of construction is correct as well. But these things don't reflect any technical limitations on the part of the Medievals or some kind of superior ability on the part of the Romans. They simply reflect different circumstances. When an absolute ruler like Vespasian with the vast economic resources of the Roman Empire (spanning from Britain to Egypt and Africa to Asia Minor and cashed up with all the loot from the recent sack of Jerusalem) is brought to bear on a project, of course it gets finished fast.

Comparing that to the economic resources of a single diocese in a single kingdom is not exactly comparing apples to apples. Until a few weeks ago I lived in an apartment looking out at St Mary's Cathedral in central Sydney. Construction began on St Mary's in 1868. They still haven't finished it. Does this mean our society is somehow technically deficient?

David B

According to Pryor's 'Britain in the Middle Ages (or via: amazon.co.uk)' which I've started, a design change on the plough was one major innovation.

David B

Antipope Innocent II

But it was a Roman innovation. It used to be thought that the "heavy plough" was an early Medieval invention which enabled heavier northern soils to be brought under cultivation and increase production levels and population, thus stimulating trade and leading to the advances and expansion of the later Middle Ages. It's now clear that the Romans developed the heavy plough.

What is less clear is why they didn't use it to its full potential. The answer is probably because they had plenty of grain being produced in the Empire's bread baskets of Egypt, Asia Minor and Africa and so simply didn't need to cut down forests and drain swamps in Gaul and Britain to bring these fertile but more difficult to work areas under cultivation. It was far easier and more economically efficient to simply grow the grain in Egypt and ship it to where it was needed via the Empire's trade infrastructure.

When the Empire collapsed and farming returned to self-sufficiency in the "Dark Ages", pre-existing technology which had not been fully exploited before came into its own. Now a local farmer had a very big incentive to cut down those forests, drain those swamps and use a heavy plough to bring the deep, fertile soils of northern Europe into cultivation. The result was a massive increase in European production levels and a far greater population that could be sustained while producing surpluses that the Romans would not have considered possible from European lands.

The growth of monasticism accelerated this process. New monasteries were established by tradition "in the desert" - ie away from civilisation. In northern Europe, that meant in the deep forests, but that meant a self-sufficient rural community being carved out of the forest and established in such a way that it could concentrate on its primary activity (prayer) and not on any other activity (everything other than prayer). This meant these "pioneer" monks utilised any technology that would make their farming more efficient and would free their number from labour so they could get back to the more important business of praying a lot. This put the Benedictines and, later, the Cistercians at the forefront of the exploitation of existing technology like the heavy plough, the scythe (more efficient than sickles) and, especially, water power.

In other words, far from somehow "stifling technology" in the Medieval period, the Church led its development in this and many other areas.

Overshot water-wheels were also a Roman Era technology and the Romans had build some large industrial complexes based on their water power, such as the 16 wheel complex at Barbegal in Gaul. But on the whole grinding of grain in the Roman Period was done by muscle power - by animals or by Rome's many millions of slaves. An early medieval farmer, on the other hand, had plenty of other things to do rather than sit around grinding grain by hand (and if he was a monk, he had hours of praying to do as well), so water mills began to be exploited on a grand scale.

As a result, whereas in Roman Britain there were only a handful of water mills in the whole province, by the Domesday survey of 1085 there were no less than 5,624 water mills in England alone. That's a absolute revolution in the application of mechanical power in anyone's language. And it happened in the "Dark Ages".

No Robots

Medieval technology and social change (or via: amazon.co.uk) is a good resource. There is a good description of how the stirrup revolutionized warfare, and other items of a similar nature.

Practical inventiveness was indeed common enough in Medieval Europe, but the philosophical foundations of thought were seriously distorted, thus retarding the advance of programmatic science. The loosening of scholasticism's stranglehold on thought in the Renaissance allowed the rebirth of philosophy, which in turn provides the foundation for modern science. Scholasticism is far from dead, however. It is simply in the process of moving away from its old wife, religion, to its new darling, evolutionism. This is a move from pseudo-spirituality to pseudo-science.

Antipope Innocent II

Lynn White's classic book is a good resource, though its thesis about how one technology led to another and how they determined social structures needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It was controversial when it was published in 1964 and is not generally accepted, at least not in full, these days. His points about the stirrup are highly overstated, for example. The stirrup was a useful addition to cavalry warfare but it was not the revolutionary technology White claims. More recent experimentation has shown that the Roman horned saddle was quite stable for even a very heavily armoured clibinarius of the Later Roman Army's beefed up cavalry arm and that mounted shock combat preceeded the adoption of the stirrup by many centuries.

They were no more "distorted" than they had been in the Ancient world. In fact, they were about the same.


The foundation of modern science can be found in the way Medieval thinking took Greek logic and applied it to the examination of everything in the belief that God was rational and therefore the universe could be apprehended rationally. You can thank the much maligned "scholasticism" for that. Where "scholasticism" was weak was in its over-reliance on "authorities" - born of a reverence for the ancients like Aristotle. If the Renaissance gave us anything other than some nice paintings and Leonardo's crackpot doodlings it was the way that period's new perspective finally got over the Medieval world's inferiority complex when it came to the ancients.


Oh dear ... I'll leave that nonsense to the experts.

Clivedurdle

Edward the Confessor and I believe before him instigated the new model village that in economic terms was revolutionary. Anyone know when it was invented?

And I understood penance had a fascinating indirect effect. William the Conqueror by killing all those soldiers and Harold had too many penances to do for his life, so he subcontracted them out to the holiest monasteries - the poorest, furthest away from anywhere. They were paid to say prayers for the kings and soon attracted money and people with brains who then set about wool farming and iron manufacture creating capitalism and the industrial revolution.

And of course the Vikings had mass production techniques and plywood.

But no one had anything like this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

and they ignored Archimedes and spent far too much time and energy on Aristotle.

Antipope Innocent II

Er, yes they did. Equatoria every bit as complicated as that existed and the larger mechanical clocks quickly developed very sophisticated planispheric projections of the movements of the planets etc. Except, unlike the Antikythera mechanism, those moved automatically by machine power. Rather more sophisticated.

Archimedes was far from "ignored". His work was considered highly important by Medieval scholars.

Brother Daniel

As opposed to cyclical or linear+eternal? I can see how Christianity would support that one, but it isn't obvious to me why it matters so much for science.
Those seem to be the main things. I assume the Greeks had them...?
"Recognition of the limits of common sense" is a good idea (and I can see how Christianity would support that one). "Reason" has limits too, of course, though "recognition of the limits of reason" too often serves as code for abandoning reason (that's how Christianity uses it IMO, though obviously YMMV), and that's not generally a good thing.
In the sense of no "nature-spirits"?
I guess going through a "dark age" could help foster that one. :devil1:
Which ones were those, exactly? (I wouldn't be terribly surprised if my guesses were wrong.)
Which did they not lack?

cajela

Sorry, I don't understand - why is linear non-eternal time relevant? Linear, OK, but science wasn't averse to a steady-state eternal universe recently. It seems not to be true, but I can't see it posing a difficulty if it were.

And weren't all those eye-glasses and printing presses & things late medieval, not dark ages? (I may have my terminology funny; I'm no historian. To me it's "dark ages" about 500-1000; "medieval" about 1000-1600.)

BTW, are any of you historians familiar with Terry Jones' Barbarians? (or via: amazon.co.uk) I read that recently and found it very intriguing.

Brother Daniel

(emphasis added)

Oddly enough, this account "rings true" to me. I'm tempted to suggest that proper scientific experimentation requires the shared involvement of the philosopher/mathematician personality type with the engineer/inventor personality type. The latter type had plenty of things to work on without any great strides in "science" per se being needed (and they did). Meanwhile, the former type is quite easily thrown off by the bit I've bolded in the quotation. The really hard part of the modern experimentalist's art is in navigating past the numerous (if not numberless) "links" mentioned here:
That same trap could be fallen into without a "magical worldview", but that's a minor quibble. (I agree that disregarding a "magical worldview" could help one escape the "numberless links" trap.) I can't see what it is about Christianity that would help dump the magical worldview, though.
The mystery, to me, is why an incomprehensible God would be assumed to make comprehensible laws, especially given...:
But why would God's freedom be circumscribed by what we have the slightest hope of understanding?

I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how Christianity could have helped things along. (I'm not asserting that it didn't.)