Science in the Dark Ages | Medieval Science History part 1.
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- čas přidán 18. 02. 2019
- In this series, we’re going to cover the intriguing history of science in medieval Europe. Medieval science is a subject that’s vital in understanding the great achievements of the scientific revolution yet is despite that often forgotten in popular history. This is the story of the precarious survival of classical learning in the early middle ages as well as the rise of the universities and the translation movements in the high middle ages.
In this video, we will start of this series by covering the fate of western science in Europe after the fall of the Roman empire and its rebirth during the Carolingian renaissance in late eight and early ninth century so stay tuned!
Photo credits.
Eric Molina.
Houston Physicists/Wikipedia.
Note: I try to use copyright free images and stock footage at all times. However, if I have used any of your artwork or video content then please don't hesitate to contact me and I’ll be more than happy to give the appropriate credit.
Mail: inkhistorycontact@gmail.com
Sources.
The beginnings of western science(David C Lindberg, 2007).
Science and religion 400 B.C - 1550 A.D(Edward Grant, 2004).
#middleages
See full series at: czcams.com/video/HZLmr2IdrJc/video.html
See part 2 on the Twelfth-century Renaissance: czcams.com/video/cGTfpPy4f_E/video.html&t
See part 3 on Medieval Astronomy: czcams.com/video/UzwC6Wr9SQo/video.html
See part 4 on Medieval Medicine: czcams.com/video/lg1R0M7AdaU/video.html&t
See part 5 on religion and science in medieval Europe: czcams.com/video/rtwbhdUveEA/video.html
There's a common but erroneous belief that there was no scientific progress in the Middle Ages. In fact, modern historians of science have long since shown this to be a myth and have gone on to show that far from being a scientific dark age, the Medieval period lay the foundations of modern science.
The standard view of the Middle Ages as a scientific wasteland has persisted for so long and is so entrenched in the popular mind largely because it has deep cultural and sectarian roots, but not because it has any real basis in fact. It is partly based on anti-Catholic prejudices in the Protestant tradition, that saw the Middle Ages purely as a benighted period of Church oppression. It was also promulgated by Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire and Condorcet who had an axe to grind with Christianity in their own time and projected this onto the past in their polemical anti-clerical writings. By the later Nineteenth Century the "fact" that the Church suppressed science in the Middle Ages was generally unquestioned even though it had never been properly and objectively examined.
It was the early historian of science, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre Duhem, who first began to debunk this polemically-driven view of history. While researching the history of statics and classical mechanics in physics, Duhem looked at the work of the scientists of the Scientific Revolution, such as Newton, Bernoulli and Galileo. But in reading their work he was surprised to find some references to earlier scholars, ones working in the supposedly science-free zone of the Middle Ages. When he did what no historian before him had done before and actually read the work of Medieval physicists like Roger Bacon (1214-1294), Jean Buridan (c. 1300- c. 1358), and Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-1382) he was amazed at their sophistication and he began a systematic study of the until then ignored Medieval scientific flowering of the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries.
What he and later modern historians of early science found is that the Enlightenment myths of the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age suppressed by the dead hand of an oppressive Church were nonsense. Duhem was a meticulous historical researcher and fluent in Latin, meaning he could read Medieval scientific works that had been ignored for centuries. And as one of the most renowned physicists of his day, he was also in a unique position to assess the sophistication of the works he was rediscovering and of recognising that these Medieval scholars had actually discovered elements in physics and mechanics that had long been attributed to much later scientists like Galileo and Newton. This did not sit well with anti-clerical elements in the intellectual elite of his time and his publishers were pressured not to publish the later volumes of his Systeme de Monde: Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic - the establishment of the time was not comfortable with the idea of the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age being overturned. Duhem died with his painstaking work largely unpublished in 1916 and it was only the efforts of his daughter Helene's 30 year struggle for her father's opus to see the light of day that saw the whole 10 volume work finally released in 1959.
By then Duhem was no longer alone in seeing the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of no science as a baseless myth. The American historian of science Lynn Thorndike had followed the same trail as Duhem and came to the same conclusions that Medieval scientists had been wrongfully ignored and neglected since the Enlightenment, largely for political and ideological reasons. In his eight volume History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923-1958) he too found that science in the Middle Ages was remarkably wide-ranging, speculative and highly sophisticated. These pioneers in the field of early science history have now been followed by a long list of historians of the subject that have made this neglected period in scientific history even more clear. Current leading scholars in the field such as David Lindberg, Ronald Numbers and Edward Grant have revolutionised our understanding of how the scientists of the Middle Ages built on the work they inherited from the Greeks and Arabs, advanced knowledge further and laid the foundations of modern science as we know it.
Grant's ground-breaking 1996 book The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages shows in detail that the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century simply could not have happened if western European scholarship had remained as it had been prior to the early Twelfth Century, or even if it has stayed as it had been in the later Third Century. It took not just the scientific advances but the intellectual changes of the later Middle Ages to set the scene for Galileo and Newton. Rather than being a dark aqe, the high Middle Ages made true modern science possible.
👍Great comment!
Great Comment man! Spot on! I have read Lindberg's and Grant's books, they are both excellent and very learned scholars. On the scientific revolution per se, I would like to add Alexandre Koyré's "From the closed World to the infinite Universe" and "Newtonian Studies" and also Thomas Kuhn "The Copernican Revolution". If the basis of Modern Science were laid in the Middle Ages, as Edward Grant claims, what did really change during the Scientific Revolution? Is the Methodology different? Are there different presupossitions about the world, a different metaphysics? Did our attitude towards nature changed?
Galileo and Newton were as Einstein, tools for the anti-theist.
Excellent efforts. Thank you so much for your attempt to enlightened my (may be our) darkened mind. God bless you.
Thanks! You to
Technically and substantively is perfect. I hope this channel will grow up.
Thankyou Justyna!
Amazing video!Very very important links for understanding what later came.. Exactly what I was looking for.Thanks.
A fantastic video, good job :)
Many Thanks Ted! :-)
For some reason I just saw this today. My favorite example of science in the Middle Ages is the witch scene from Monty Python.
That nose was suspicious though... :)
She floated like a duck too!
This was a great video Quill with incredible editing! My only critique was that your Roman guy was a bit too childish looking compared to the serious tone of the rest of the video but that's really nitpicking.
I've learned a lot from this and frankly, medical history is an underappreciated field so I look forward to the next episodes. Keep up the awesome work!
Thx Barris! I agree with you on that point, the only reason I used the image of the Roman guy was that it was the only one I could find that was royalty free. What will your next video be about? :)
@@quillinkhistory9539 Oh yeah, I understand. I know that I waste a stupid amount of time finding royalty free images so I feel you. My next video will be about the guillotine! I'm in the middle of the midterm seasons so I haven't had much time to work on it but it should come out next week. I hope you enjoy it :)
@@ThisisBarris Looking forward to it! :D
very nice info my guy
definitely an underrated part of history and really nice maps
Thx Ancient accounts! Do you have a channel? :)
Quill & Ink History Quill & Ink History Yeah I do I also do history but I didn't know anything about Charlemagne and your series is really good so far
great video
Thx Stefán! Glad you liked it :)
Thank God for Quill and Ink History.
I wish i could help you make a more detailed video though. I'm an avid reader, but i absorb more quickly by visual and experience learning. You're right that time constraint didn't do justice on study of Natural Philosophy in Middle Age.
i think you probably shouldn't use 'Dark Age' term in this video since it represent Enlightenment snobbery, but well...i think we have to consider the audience as popular rather than academic.
Thx Yoshua! For your info, when I'm referring to the "dark ages" I mainly refer to the first centuries of the middle ages due to its lack of literacy and political stability. It will only be used in this video in the series.
Good video, your video has been posted in the Shadiversity discord, I will try to spread the word.
I greatly appreciate that Jinseual! Btw, do you know what's up with the RCH team? Haven't seen any new videos from them in a while.
@@quillinkhistory9539 J Steven Roberts is still writing his new book, and he has a kid to take care of, I don't know about the others.
@@Jinseual Thx for the info, have he said when he will go back to making videos?
@@quillinkhistory9539 I don't know, it may take a while.
As long as people still know the Earth was in fact spherical, science is considered to still exist.
The only time when science is really threatened is MODERN TIMES, right now, because of the flat earthers.
Very wholesome
Is that good or bad?
@@quillinkhistory9539 It just means it's wholesome, nothing more.
1. Great video. 2. nadir ['neidǝ]
Glad you liked it, did I mispronounce the word nadir?
@@quillinkhistory9539 It's ok. It is still perfectly understandable.
Ejercicio metabólico fácil
Just blow it up with gunpowder, too good.
Thx for the kind response History centre :)
Referring to the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages is already historical bogus.
Im glad to defend the middle ages from the calumnies laid against it, however I think the next step to understanding our current situation is recognizing the religion of that time is as lost as Classical Paganism is, and ultimately I dont see how denying the foreign and anti social features of early Christianity, or over exalting its wisdom in comparison to Greco-Roman or Indian philosophy, can be sustained today.
Are you a far right hindutwa hate moger? I'm an indian and i know of the "wisdom" of indian philosophy. Until the 19th century colonial era this subcontinent was a mess of horrible superstitions and barbarities of the "wisdom" of the hindu pagan philosophy like burning widows alive, killing and oppressing low caste people of the hindu caste system labelling them as "shudras" and female infanticide and much more..All these barbaric pagan "wisdom" was removed by the british christians whom self hating whities like you despise..
Al Ghazali is superior to Aquinas.
Who the fuk is ghazali?? 🤣
@@alangervasissomeone who started the failing of eastern civilization