
In an ancient workshop, discovering modern ideas (2015) - benbreen
http://magazine.columbia.edu/explorations/winter-2015-16/ancient-workshop-discovering-modern-ideas
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clock_tower
The 1500s are ancient now? I wonder what that makes the classical world.

For historians, the 1500s are modern times. The early modern period was
traditionally "from Columbus to Napoleon", but these days is generally
reckoned in round numbers, 1500 to 1800. Prior to 1500 is the Middle Ages
(500-1500, overlapping with "late antiquity" from 300 to 700); after 1800s is
either "modernity" or "middle modernity". It's anyone's guess whether the
contemporary world can be called "late modern" or not; but the 1500s can
hardly be called ancient.

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Outdoorsman
Fascinating...thanks for posting this...

I especially appreciated this quote:

>>“Basically, this was the birth of the modern scientific process,” she says.
“Inspired by what they saw in the workshops, the great natural philosophy and
medical societies of Europe would, by the mid-seventeenth century, embrace
laboratory experimentation as the basis for accumulating new knowledge about
the physical world.”<<

The Renaissance was a fascinating period in history...knowledge intentionally
repressed for approximately four centuries during the Dark Ages, followed by a
gradual rebirth...

I've often wondered what those of exceptional intellectual and/or creative
abilities had to endure just because they were born into a time that refused
to let them "bloom"...so many obstacles in their way...that must have been
hard to bear...

~~~
scottlocklin
Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste kind of invented the scientific method in
the 1200s.... The religious wars and black death put a lot of dampers on
Western Science during the high middle ages, and but science was not exactly
deliberately repressed.

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clock_tower
Indeed. Science wasn't suppressed in the Middle Ages and restored during the
Renaissance; it flourished through the 1300s, then was stopped dead by the
Black Death, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation, and the wars of
religion -- roughly 1350 to 1600-1650, not 1000 to 1400.

Improvement in the human condition in Europe was stopped for longer by that
series of catastrophes (and was also badly slowed down by the Renaissance,
which introduced a new fashion for Plato, aristocracy, and philosophy instead
of the old style of Aristotle, observation, and practical knowledge).
Conditions had improved dramatically until the early 1300s; then they
stagnated, sometimes even going backwards, until about the 1750s in England, a
bit later on the Continent.

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benbreen
I appreciate that you're defending the pre-Renaissance period from being
called the Dark Ages (a term worth abandoning if there ever was one) but I
think you're being led astray here by equating a breakdown in "the human
condition" with the status of scientific knowledge.

The demographic/epidemiological/economic/political crises of the 17th century,
after all, overlapped with the period that's traditional considered the high
point of the Scientific Revolution - heck, Newton even began working on his
optics and calculus during an outbreak of the Plague! - so it's not clear to
me that two actually have much to do with one another. Granted, a certain
baseline for material conditions and political stability needs to exist for
scientific work to take place, but beyond that I don't buy the argument that
something like, say, wars of religion or periods of plague necessarily leads
to intellectual stagnation. From the 17th century crisis to WWII, I'd actually
say that it's arguably the opposite.

I'm also struck by the fact that the period where you consider science to have
"stopped dead" overlaps with Copernicus, Bacon, and Galileo! All this isn't
intended to be argumentative at all, I just find debating this stuff to be
interesting, and I'm an early modern historian so I couldn't resist being
pedantic about it.

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scottlocklin
Kenneth Clark thinks the 12th-13th century was special in some mysterious way;
pointing out that all kinds of interesting progress happened then. There was
certainly a great deal of learning which occurred then; in addition to Bacon
and Grosseteste; Witelo, Albertus Magnus, Petrus Peregrinus, Leonardo
Fibonacci, Abelard. In the spiritual realm, Francis of Assisi; an important
thinker even to the non-religious.

Clark points out that, oddly, a lot of interesting and nice things happened in
other civilizations at around the same time. I can't list any at present, as
my world history isn't as good as Clark's, but it's in his documentary. I
dunno, maybe the weather was particularly conducive to elevated thinking.

The conventional wisdom is that science was hamstrung by the black death,
since something like half the population of Europe died off. While Newton
escaped a plague at Cambridge during his miraculous year, that's not the same
level of disaster as half the population going away. Anyway, history nerding
is fun.

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calibraxis
> “Basically, this was the birth of the modern scientific process”...

Why is this stuff never backed up with arguments/evidence? Alhazen was around
many centuries before (in Cairo).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen)

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Wingman4l7
"In Europe" or "In the Western world" could well be implied.

~~~
benbreen
Yes, especially with the key term "modern" in there - seems pretty clearly to
be referring to the Scientific Revolution which really was largely a
16th/17th/18th century Western thing.

