spin

I have indicated that he was excommunicated in Geneva because he espoused the Copernican system there. By espousing the Copernican system he was advocating a scientific position. His work "La Cena de le Ceneri" deals with Copernicus and the structure not only of the solar system but of the universe at length. What exactly would you like? He deals with the structure of the universe in other works. Perhaps some citations from La Cena?


spin

Agnostic Professor

Well I am also an academic historian and I have never "given an academic article". I have "given" papers at conferences which were yet to be peer reviewed and I have "published articles" in peer-review journals, so I am not sure what you mean when you say you have "given...articles".

countjulian

I'll just respond to this point as it directly addresses my work.

You're wrong to say that those were the only works targeted for destruction, or more accurately, not deemed worthy of preservation. The Oxford guide to the Classical World (no, I don't have it on me, burrowed it from the library) in one early of its chapters relates how the Christians left us essentially one continual view of antiquity, both in the histories and the sciences. And I'll produce what MacMullen said in regard to the sources he cites: "both secular and ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly destroyed unedifying texts, in well advertised ceremonies, most obviously in sectarian disputes where rival claims of Orthodoxy were pitted against each other; whereupon one of them being along with its creeds and treatises would be declared heterodox by the other, and measures would be taken to insure that no trace of its existence remained except, perphaps, what might be embedded in victorious proofs and rejoinders. NonChristian writings came in for the same treatment, that is, destruction in the great bonfires of the town square. Copyists were discouraged from replacing them by threat of having their hands cut off." We got Aristotle, but not Posidinus, Ptolemy, but not Aristarchus, Josephus but not Justus of Tiberias. And as for all of the "Christian" scholars laboring their lives away in anonymity to preserve for you & me the wisdom of the ancient world, what you forgot to mention was that is was up to Muslim scholars like Avicenna to relate Galen et al to backwards Christian Europe. For a long time, all that was available on Plato (in spite of Augustine's love of Platonism) was an incomplete copy of Timeaus, and Galen was unknown. Part of the problem was that the Graeco-Roman world had an infrastructure of scriptoriums and libraries which kept ALL different types of manuscripts flowing and books widely available to those who wanted to enquire. The Christian system that replaced it was an unlinked stitchwort of abbeys and monasteries that were completely ignorant of goings on far from home (thanks to the collapse of effective communications, especially in the West). Often these texts were still written down somewhere, but no one knew of them, which is why Renaissance scholars like Petrarch had to work so hard to hunt down all of the different manuscripts (leading Russian mathematician A.T. Fomenko to the amusing conclusion that antiquity was forged by monks working in the middle ages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chr..._%28Fomenko%29 ). Another problem with this system is that, as you said, "we may sometimes find their priorities unfortunate", which would be a gross understatement. Many times the monks could not even read what they were copying. Although after the torturous death of paganism pagan texts per se where not targeted for destruction, certain texts were looked down upon at certain times, and we know what would happen if a monk was confronted with a choice between another book of Jerome's Bible Commentaries and Aristarchus. The last problem to be confronted was canonization. Thanks to the Christians conception of an unchanging Biblical canon for all times (though people are still trying to nail it down today) and their induction into the wonderful world of Platonic forms, when the Christians finally got their hands on a great pagan author like Galen, they seized upon and canonized him like a book of the Bible, even though this is not what the Muslims had done. The ancient Greeks themselves, including members of the school Aristotle himself developed, contradicted Aristotle, for instance Strato of Lampsacus who said, in opposition to Aristotle, that objects accelerate as they fall instead of falling at uniformly the same rate depending on their weight, and was also an atheist who denied the "unmoved mover."

Philadelphia Lawyer

I believe the poster was referring to this article, which he gave (in the sense of cited to) in post 57: "Vesalius: C Donald O’Malley ‘Andreas Vesalius’ Pilgrimage’ Isis 45:2 (1954)." Unfortunately, there appears to be no link to the article available. Nor have any summaries of or quotations from the article been presented on this thread.

On the other hand, Vivian Nutton, Professor of the History of Medicine at the University College London, says the following, in his introduction to the Vesalius project at Northwestern University:

link

While Professor Nutton clearly does not endorse the Inquisition version of Vesalius' departure, neither does he endorse any other version. Presumably, O'Malley's version is the "fulfilment of a vow" account, which according to Nutton, is based on someone who claimed to have heard it from Vesalius' fellow expatriots in Spain. There is no question that Nutton is familiar with O'Malley's work, as his 40 year old biography of Vesalius appears in the project's bibliography. Nevertheless, Nutton does not appear to accept O'Malley's account (if "the fulfilment of a vow" version is indeed his) as conclusive on the issue of what prompted Vesalius to leave Spain.

countjulian

I am not quite sure why you fall for these myths?

The point seems to be quite the opposite of yours. In Medieval times
http://www.godecookery.com/mtales/mtales08.htm, bathing was popular. There was even a Guild of Bathhouse Keepers. It seems to have been after the medieval and renaissance period that bathing fell out of fashion or got a bad reputation.

This does not imply daily showers for all, looking at this as a romantic period, or that there were no critical comments on it from moralizers. However, both in Byzantium (as shown by e.g. Anna Comnenia) and in Medieval Europe, people did bath with far more vigour than what has been commonly understod, as shown here http://gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/baths.html :

And I not end statements with a question mark?

Just Kidding! That would be a cheap shot, and besides, I'm sure I've made some gammar mis takes. But I now me spill chucker won't fail me know!

Well let’s see, sources, sources. Well, for starters, since we stared out with an article from Ken's site, let's start with http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/ruin.html and don't forget the picture version http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/medicine.html for all you Germanic barbarians out there. Since you guys don't seem to hot on Humphrey (anti-Christian polemic is a no-no but apologetics seems OK) we shall also add in a source I would say is A. Reliable and B. Somewhat sympathetic to Christianity, Cecil Adams http://www.straightdope.com/columns/041217.html . A more specialist site is http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...l_peasants.htm . Basically, bathing was only for the really rich, and then only once a week (like you said, a Sunday bath MIGHT be OK if it didn't interfere with prayer time). Like the article says, the peasant got 2 baths in his life: once, when they were born and when they had died. The public baths in London and Florence served recreational bathers (and those looking for a little unchaste action) on a couple-of-times-a-month basis, and the vast majority of people could not afford to take a bath, thanks to the ruination of the public water system at the hands of Justinian's army and Christian partisans (also helped along by the loss of Concrete, another great leap forward in Christian science), just as willing to pilfer a bath as a temple to furnish a church. What's more, since the closest river now had to serve both the needs of our trendy bathers and the city's waste management department (as well as the city's congregation of dihydrogen monoxide junkies) the water they took their baths in was filthy and unclean.

So either you have better sources than the links I have provided (and their sources), or you may perhaps want to reconsider your position?

No actually I feel like a strong, confident woman ready to quit smoking, take on the male dominated business world, and go take a nice pagan bath. Thanks for asking though.

Bede

Dunno. Please could I have a reference for that bit of information.

Thanks

Bede

Edited as question answered above.

Mr Lawyer,

I can't be bothered with all this second guessing and research by google. Nor am I interested in redebunking all the myths every time someone finds a new link. It's just boring. Sorry. I fear that if we kept discussing, the same thing would happen and every ten seconds a new poster would jump in an repeat the whole lot again. We are all biased and all doing our best to be objective. But the myths of conflict are as well debunked as anything else in history and no amount of googling is going to change that.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede

I'll check out MacMullen but I've already looked up both the cites to sources you said he gave and they relate to Porphryr and a Christian heretic called Arius. If that is all he's got then he is exaggerating a bit. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature says (p. 535, New ed.) "There is no reason to believe that the early Christians in the Greek half of the Roman Empire set about the systematic destruction of pagan classical literature." I think your quote from the OGCW just refers to what was copied (although it's standard Po-Mo to state your sources have been selected whether you've got evidence for it or not).

Best wishes

Bede

Clivedurdle

a history of concrete

Interesting, this site has nothing between 540 CE and 1200 CE.

Lafcadio

If he challanged why do you say he didn't contribute?

Regiomontanus actually criticised Almagest (Epytoma in almagesti Ptolemei). One cause of the Copernican revolution is not some kind of revelation but the waves of critiques against Ptolemeic cosmos. Nobody changes a thing which works.
He might be mainly known for creating horoscopes by people interested in that. Copernicus actually used Regiomontanus' works and observations.

Not quite. By 8th century most traces of Roman life were wiped out. Southern France and Spain (the influence of Visigothic kingdom) preserved best the Roman traits (until the Arabic invasion). Italy has his post-Roman glory under the Ostrogoths of Theoderic I (which was one of the few barbaric kings who was actually a mecena and regarded classical education and culture with admiration). Between the Italy of Theodoric and the Italy of Renaissance there's absolutely no connection, in case this was the image that suggested the above claims.

"Carolingian Renaissance" is but not that overrated as your quotes insinuate. We can have a parenthesis about it as it regards the topic.

There's still to be proven that Christianity backwarded science and not the waves of uneducated Germanics with little regard to Classical values. There are a lot of "dark ages" in the history of mankind and Christianity wasn't there to provoke them. If you think this time it's Christianity's fault, please show. But then you might want to explain the disregard of classical culture in many early Germanic kingdoms or the total destruction of Romanity in Britain under the waves of Saxons, Jutes and Angles which plunged the island in two century of darkness. And not that these guys bear all the blame. Roman's world started to decay since 2nd or 3rd century (depends what factors you consider important). Beside the religious factors which I suspect you may want to discuss to support your view, there're many others. If you want to find out what Classical culture dissappeared we may try to, but I have a feeling that such a discussion will not focus on Christianity.

It was not universally considered and not for a millenium as you insinuate. There're plenty of accounts of bathing and even regular bathing (for the latter I'm thinking of details from aristocracy's or king's life) which show the reality was not that dark.

One reason for "downs" is the primitive medicine connecting various diseases with water (most of the times unfounded, I say most of the times because I'm thinking of diseases like the more-recent in Europe, cholera).
Another reason is the low life standard of the population. There are "downs" in hygiene which go together with "downs" in alimentation.

I was refering to pre-Renaissant accounts. Like public baths during 1200s. Were they that unpopular that during 13th century in Paris there's a guild of public bath owners? Were they that unpopular as some decrees from the same century forbade public bath owners to keep whores?

You have a long way to prove this was a general view. And keep in mind we're talking of somehow rich people from urban life. Bathing in a river is an aspect we can't talk about due to lack of evidences.

Public baths, yes, you needed some cash to afford. But a wooden barrel at home was not (always) a luxury.


Church fathers also didn't agree with prostitution or murder. We talk about medieval realities not what Church fathers said. Starting from the above quote one must prove that most people listened to it to make a point. I doubt the average peasant or blacksmith was reading or listening the words of Jerome.

www.jesusneverexisted.com is a joke of a site. I already gave few hints why.

I disagree with both. Can you leave both behind?