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

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progress-in-Europe-in-the-Middle-Ages/answer/Tim-ONeill-1?share=1

by i04n • 12 years ago

97 64 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

akkartik2• 12 years 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

ggreer• 12 years 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.

akkartik2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

You'd probably enjoy Anathem by Neil Stephenson in that case.

pacofvf• 12 years 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

jackjeff2• 12 years 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.

Tloewald3• 12 years 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.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years 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.

jackjeff2• 12 years 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 Middle Ages period is 5th to 15th century.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

they key to the article isn't the years covered but the fact that the Church wasn't suppressing knowledge which many people have an irrational inability to recognize.

bane2• 12 years ago

There's a weird kind of historic revisionism that's been going on the last couple years regarding the Medieval period...the "things weren't all that bad" and "the notion that nothing happened is just a myth".

Is it real? Are we just now learning about advanced and invention that happened during this period and were previously ignoring/ignorant of? Maybe. But I suspect something else is at play here, I'm just not sure what.

man, if that doesn't make me sound like a conspiracy theorist

I mean, we actually know that not only was there pitifully little scientific advancement during that period (especially as you point out in the first half), but that science and technology regressed massively and entire fields were completely forgotten. For example, there was a gap of over a thousand years before anybody could build large domes again, and even then it had to be completely reinvented.

The loss of knowledge was vast and unprecedented in history. I've heard it said that Western Europe almost reverted back out of the Iron Age the loss of information was so great.

What's triggering all this revisionism? Again, I don't know, but sources like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hwrSE5DZrQ

list all things that happened in the later periods.

Even if you just blame the first 500 years, that's a loong time where not much of anything interesting happened.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

There's a weird kind of historic revisionism that's been going on the last couple years

For various values of "last couple", e.g., I remember at least one college history class I had around 1996 where the instructor spent some time (it was something of a tangent from the central focus of the class) discussing research (which I don't think was particularly new at the time, but something the instructor thought most students wouldn't be aware of) which seemed to refute the existence of a period of a lack of technological development in the Middle Ages in Europe. (Not that a lot of early-developed technology wasn't lost or at least less widely distributed, just that new developments continued despite that.)

javajosh• 12 years ago

I have witnessed the same change in the zeitgeist, and also wondered about it's source. My hypothesis is that it's rooted in the trend toward environmental sustainability, local and human-powered production (e.g. hand-made things from locally acquired materials).

It seems reasonable to me to believe that life wasn't that bad even for a Christian peasant, assuming: good health, good weather, no plague, no war (to be conscripted in), ugly daughters (to avoid prima nocta). Sure, you didn't own anything but life was simple, food was good, the world was understandable (even if your understanding was primitive and wrong), and the countryside must have been beautiful to explore. Plus you had the remarkable benefit of dreaming about truly foreign and far-away places, like Africa, India or China. Even countries within Europe were so distinct from each other as to make travel a real adventure.

There's an interesting take on going back to something like this in Paolo Bacigalupi's _The Windup Girl_[1]. The world has undergone a "Contraction" and oil is incredibly scarce. Travel is difficult and expensive; the world has grown large again, and human and animal power are once again the staples (although military and governments still use oil for some things).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl

graeme4• 12 years ago

There may or may not be a new revisionism, but the idea has been around a while. I first remember coming across this idea in Timeline by Michael Crichton:

http://www.amazon.com/Timeline-Michael-Crichton/dp/034541762...

And I doubt he came up with the idea. I also think I heard that this debate has been going on in medieval scholarship for a while.

That said, the debate is unlikely to be a strawman that glosses over the very real collapse in certain types of knowledge. I doubt the scholarly debate explains whatever is currently happening on the popular level.

bglazer• 12 years ago

Your point about the domes is quite interesting. Can you imagine what it was like to be a citizen of Rome in the year 800, looking at a dome that is hundreds of years old and having no idea how people could possibly do that. I can't think of a modern analogue.

It would be like finding the monolith from 2001 on the moon.

4891• 12 years ago

I mean, we actually know that not only was there pitifully little scientific advancement during that period (especially as you point out in the first half), but that science and technology regressed massively and entire fields were completely forgotten. For example, there was a gap of over a thousand years before anybody could build large domes again, and even then it had to be completely reinvented.

Like a few commenters here, you're confusing the dark ages and the middle ages. You can quibble over semantics and say that the middle ages includes the dark ages, but that obscures the point of the original post.

The standard narrative of Western intellectual progress looks like this:

~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture

~400AD to ~1500AD: Europe under the dominion of the Church, science and reason suppressed

~1500AD: bam, Renaissance

~1700AD: bam, Enlightenment

~1700AD - present: humanity freed from the yoke of religion, knowledge flowers again.

The revisionist view is as follows:

~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture

~400AD to ~1000AD: Europe in the dark ages due to barbarian invasions, underpopulated and poor, classical tradition barely kept alive in monasteries

~1000AD to ~1400AD: Europe begins to get wealthier, knowledge flowers in Church-sponsored universities

~1600AD: bam, Protestant Reformation

~1600AD - present: science builds on knowledge and philosophy developed by Catholic church, but Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda creates the false narrative of Church suppression of knowledge.

I don't know why this perspective is hitting the zeitgeist now, but one reason might be that the internet enables niche communities to share such ideas.

One such group is Catholics - here's a Catholic blogger explaining exactly how the heliocentrism vs geocentrism debate played out: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Another group are environmentalists - here's an interesting blogger writing about how classical knowledge was preserved through the dark ages: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/merlins-ti...

And a final group are the reactionaries, a group who see the modern ideals of progress as a myth - here's a good starting point on the idea that modern 'progressive' ideas are largely derived from Protestantism: http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-...

Anyone who's interested and has the free time, please do dig around those blogs - you may realise, as I did, that the 21st century is quite an intellectually narrow and ignorant time.

antman• 12 years ago

There was another "Dark Ages" period in 1200BC [1] when dome building was again forgotten for 1400 years although it was quite usual in tomb building [2]. During that dark ages 500 year period most cities near the Mediterranean were destroyed, and it is attributed to the "Sea Peoples" [3]. Population in eastern mediterranean was reduced to 1/9 of its previous numbers and commerce that numbered thousands of ship transports ceased.

One can only imagine were we would be, if we had not forgotten printed type by 2500BC[4] or small gear mechanisms by 100 BC [5]

Non "Dark-ages" years are less than the "dark ages" years in recorded history, we just like to think that civilization improves over time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse [2] http://traveltoeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/wpid- [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples Photo-Apr-1-2013-151-PM.jpg [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

sbmassey• 12 years ago

I didn't read the article yet, but the Carolingian Renaissance was smack in the middle of that period, and was pretty culturally fertile, with pipe organs, new architecture, the invention of lower case Latin script, and so forth.

dang• 12 years ago

Such an intellectually dishonest title

We changed the title to that of the page itself, which obviously doesn't make the claim you're objecting to. Surprised we didn't do it earlier.

mmaldacker• 12 years ago

And the article doesn't even mention Fibonacci or Al-Kashi.

Tloewald3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Curious - why a 'life's work'? Wouldn't it have taken a few months?

huxley• 12 years 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.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years 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...

willvarfar• 12 years 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?

rpenm2• 12 years ago

A response to a similar question on 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.

rpenm2• 12 years ago

Appending ?share=1 to a Quora URL should let you view it without logging in.

torrance• 12 years 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...

benbreen2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

benbreen2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

A friend of mine recently published a related article:

Scientific Geniuses and Their Jesuit Collaborators

http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-...

vorg2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Is Quora the new way to publish papers?

arjn• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

There isn't a way to measure scientific progress.

dallos• 12 years ago

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

sanoli2• 12 years 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

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

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