And when had natural sciences belonged to the masses?
mr. jp writes:
> I have heard the claim many times before, that the early middle ages weren’t
> really so bad. But I’m not convinced. It seems to me like some sort of dull-witted
> little brother that you people are too polite to make fun of.
>
> What happened during this time? They copied a lot of bibles more effectively?
> They built a lot of big churches? Bronze casting was rediscovered? Yawn.
> Leonardo did better work than this on a lazy afternoon. There was a “great
> philosopher” who interpreted a Greek philosopher, and actually was not even
> European? Give me a break.
>
> Meanwhile all the proper classical stuff like sanitation and natural science was
> forgotten and lost to the masses.
>
> The dark ages fucking sucked.
The point is that the Middle Ages weren’t as bad as the propaganda of the Renaissance historians made the period out to be. It wasn’t as great a time as the people who have idolized it (mostly in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century) think it was. It was a pretty diverse period, and if you want to know about it in more detail, read the books mentioned in this thread. There has been an immense amount of good scholarship done on the Middle Ages in the past one hundred or so years. Read Inventing the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor for some information on that scholarship. People think that any question they ask can be answered by one post in a thread. It can’t. Sometimes there isn’t any substitute for reading books.
Ok, what did Leonardo actually do? Left a slew of painting commissions unfinished or shoddily completed, wrote backwards, did some neat doodles of machines that might or might not work, and played the lute really well at parties in Milan. Clever guy, but hardly productive on any afternoon. The Renaissance also fucking sucked as much as the dark ages, really.
(Renaissance scholar here)
Well, always writing backwards is pretty awesome.
In the renaissance, Columbus discovered America, Copernicus made his somewhat silly heliocentric system and the clitoris was discovered. And that’s just what I could think of for the letter “C”. What does your beloved dark ages have to say to that? And no, cure by leeches doesn’t count.
If it weren’t for the renaissance we wouldn’t have known that the soul communicates through the pineal gland, that you should just go to the toilet no matter how impolite it is, or that sociopaths make the best princes.
The renaissance can kick the dark ages’ stagnant butt any day of the week.
I agree with you completely here. To me “the Dark Ages weren’t so bad” is one of those things that Western Civ 101 Professors say to surprise their charges, and the rest of us have all just sort of gone along with it for fear of sounding uncouth or unlearned. I understand that learning, technology, etc. didn’t completely disappear during the dark ages. I’ve read Bede, know of the Carolingian, and have seen the Book of Kells. But compared to what came both before and after the Dark Ages did indeed blow. An anecdotal, but pertinent illustration of this is that in the 1200’s the city of Rome’s population had declined to something like 50,000 people who more or less made their living by plundering stone from the Roman buildings. The thing is even where there was learning et al in the monasteries, it was basically shut away from the wider world so that didn’t really disseminate to the outside(not to mention that their isolated nature made them uniquely susceptible to destruction by the Vikings so that much of their achievements were simply eradicated.)
I’ve always found Monte Testaccio quite a telling illustration of just how much wealthier and more developed the Roman economic system was than later eras. Half a million cubic metres of amphora discarded because they were surplus to requirements, despite being of excellent quality and in good condition.
Compared to today, the Renaissance sucked just as hard.
The world was in perfectly fine shape throughout that period of time. It’s just that to most Europeans and most Americans, who got their sense of history from Europeans, anything that didn’t happen in Europe, and mostly in northern Europe, didn’t count. The Dark Ages are a purely provincial invention.
Even if you count nothing but Europe, the daily life of the vast majority of Europeans didn’t change very much at all between 700 and 1700. We look back and cherry pick a few things that are of importance to us, but choose to ignore 99.9% of all existence for those years. So what if a few extra books got written? The bulk of the population was illiterate for hundreds of years after Gutenberg. So what if Leonardo put some entries into diaries nobody read for hundreds of years? Nothing in them came into use at the time.
The Renaissance changed the lives of a few people in cities. But almost all the population didn’t live in cities. Cities were insupportable and unaffordable. The Romans proved that. They spent every penny they had on wars to keep Rome safe and on projects to make Rome even slightly livable. They were in dire financial shape for almost every single year of the Empire. Rome’s best legacy was to prove to everyone in Europe never again to try to cram a million people in one place. Without the needs of a million people, you didn’t have the money, manpower, or scale to do advanced engineering works. It wasn’t that everyone forget sanitation. Every city had major sanitation projects. Any society that could build a cathedral could do the engineering. They just couldn’t justify spending the money to try to scale them up to needed size.
Rome failed because it was so big and greedy that it beggared itself. Cities didn’t fail. Cities in Arabia and India and China were fabled, but they worked because they had potentates controlling large enough empires to have the resources. After Rome, Europe stayed in small dukedoms and countys and baronys. They thought they were doing just fine for that scale. There’s no reason for us to think differently.
During the so-called “dark Ages”? From what I understand, the Romans had sewers and public baths; this presumably allowed their population to stay free of many diseases. I associate the Medieval ages with dirt, bad smells, and lax hygeine. So, were the Romans better at keeping clean than the people of the AD 500-1000 periods?
Is this going to be available in the US? I am not having any luck finding it on amazon.com, only Amazon’s UK website.
In addition to the Terry Jones book, and the Thomas Cahill book, both mentioned above, you may also want to read Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells.
It is newly published, the publication date is July, 2008. A relatively brief book at about 250 pages, it shares a sensibility with the Jones book. In the notes I made on finishing Wells book, I noted that it was athought-provoking reconsideration of The Dark Ages. In summary fashion, Wells considered all aspects of life in the Dark Ages, and presents evidence that would suggests to me that there may have been gloom, but it was not inky blackness. Also noteworthy in the book was a historical perspective on London, through Roman occupation and into the Dark Ages.
Nothing to add. Subscribe to thread isn’t working.
My most humble apologies for interrupting.
I bloody well knew we’d contributed more than drunken brawling to world culture.
Shut it you popish savage. It’s the English that saved the world dagnammit!
Just in case any one other than me cares - I contacted the author’s agent and they said Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, will be publishing the book in the US next year.
I don’t doubt sewage systems were better in Roman times, but that’s also probably not saying much except with regard to the richest neighborhoods. In medieval times, there weren’t many true cities anyway, so it wouldn’t apply.
But from what I have read, personal hygeine in medieval times was as good or better than Roman times … and better than post-Renaissance as well. wikipedia puts it this way.
That is consistent with what I have read elsewhere, such as Those Terrible Middle Ages! by Pernoud.
For good pop history, I’d go with James Burke. It’s been a while, but I taped and rewatched Connections and the Day the Universe Changed several times as a pre-teen. While not strictly about the Middle Ages, he looks back at the history of important technologies, and the earlier technologies that were used to make these innovations, starting in modern times, and often winding up in Classical times. A great deal, though, was spent in the period between 700-1700. At least in my memory. Now I’ll have to rent it.
Seems I remember reading somewhere that the dark ages were, in some years, literally dark. Overcast, cloudy and unusually rainy. Am I way off base here?
The clitoris was discovered during the renaissance???
Who told you that?
Maybe they discovered the erection while they were at it?
It was no doubt a reference to the claim that it was first documented by Renaldus Columbus in 1559. As you’d expect, Cecil’s column on the subject is both rather sensible and does all the jokes.
I have it the best authority that the Ages were only Dark after sundown, & things were greatly improved by 6AM or so.;)