Crazy days them medeival times.
Are we agreed then that the answer to the op is “yes, and no with a relaxed definition of yes and no.”?
The Church was the only remaining organization capable of preserving and extending scholarship.
The manner in which it did so, though, was quite different from modern scholarship, and heavily influenced by its own ideology… which by our standards is a corruption of the process.
So the answer is yes and no. It was an enemy of modern scientific thought, but a friend to existing knowledge and to limited inquiry.
Was the medeival Christian church
Relatively speaking, yes.
But then my dog doesn’t have bad breath, relatively speaking.
But “modern scholarhip” and our standards did not exist at the time. “Modern scientific thought” hadn’t been invented yet (and is still an ideal that isn’t always lived up to). You can’t just judge them by rules that wouldn’t be developed for hundreds of years. The medieval churches were, in many ways, the foundations for what we have now. They preserved books and records and valued literacy when the rest of the continent did not. Monasteries eventually led to universities and scientific academies.
Probably becasue the rest of the continent did not have the money to own volumes of literature.
While the church was the foundation for science of the time, it was not a good foundation. Science had to be in agreement with the church.
Like a child gifted in the arts, yet chastised by parents who do not find the works aesthetically pleasing. While the current situation does nurture the child’s talent to a degree, it isn’t the best environment for which the child could hone his/her skill.
** Why not? I judge this society by rules that won’t be widely developed and accepted for hundreds of years.
Yes… so?
It does. The church was not the monolithic, unified organism that most moderns believe that it must have been. It was just as fractious as any other international and multi-ethnic organization. Elements assisted, elements hindered.
If you are saying that modern science and scholarship are not also heavily influenced by ideology, then I definitely have some good books to suggest to you.
Quickie outline. Even a generic outline should give any reasonable person pause. From the German persecution of heretics, the First Crusade, followed by the castration of Abelard, and on, and on. The Church monopolized all learning and forced it to be interpreted through a biblical lens. Sometimes something useful managed to escape. Anyone who dared to stray out of their little intellectual box could be crushed under a rock, if they were lucky. Books that didn’t meet Christian muster were destroyed, or lost to history forever.
As a point of fact, Abelard wasn’t “castrated for his heresies”, as that timeline says. He was castrated because he had an affair with, and then secretly married one of his students. When her family found out, they got their revenge.
More generally, that timeline cherry picks historical events, sometimes gets them wrong (like the Abelard one), and tries to depict medieval Christianity in the worst possible light.
Whatever. Google: “heretic fork.” Now tell me about intellectual freedom in the Middle Ages.
The medieval Catholic church most decidedly did NOT trust the individual to think for himself. The whole idea of the “personal relationship with god” or personal revelation from Bible study was the main theological dispute which drove the Reformation.
Also, “egalitarianism” (as opposed to invidivualism) is an invention of the French Revolution, a movement which violently rejected the church.
First, I find a lot of records of the Heretic’s Fork being used in the Spanish Inquisition, and some of it being used in the Roman Inquisition, but not really before that. Do you know that it was used in the middle ages, and not just the rennaisance.
Second, heretics ain’t scientists. The Catholic Church could at the same time persecute the Albegensians and support the study of mathematics.
Third, that doesn’t change the fact that your site is biased and in parts incorrect.
** True, true.
Oh, they’re influenced by ideology, yes – but now such a thing is regarded as inherently negative and corrupting (by others, if not necessarily by the researchers in question).