
Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages? - i04n
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progress-in-Europe-in-the-Middle-Ages/answer/Tim-ONeill-1?share=1
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tjradcliffe
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine-Industrial-
Revolution-
Middle/dp/0140045147/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410818839&sr=8-1&keywords=the+medieval+machine)

------
Tloewald
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.

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

~~~
huxley
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.

------
akkartik
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz)

~~~
ggreer
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.

~~~
akkartik
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..

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devindotcom
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.

------
jackjeff
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.

~~~
bane
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](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.

~~~
javajosh
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl)

~~~
mjmahone17
The reason Feudalism came about was because it was a good deal for the average
bloke. You weren't constantly threatened by slavery, you were mostly protected
from raiding, etc. by your landlord, and you only had to work on someone
else's land (in the beginning) 1 or 2 days a week. The reason we hear about it
being so awful is because we hear about the last legs of Feudalism: when
peasants were expected to work 8+ days a week (children counted for a half
day, so this was actually possible) on the lord's land, and because of a rise
in population had their labor devalued, and the average acreage for individual
plots reduced.

------
torrance
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world)

~~~
benbreen
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
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.

------
michaelsbradley
A friend of mine recently published a related article:

 _Scientific Geniuses and Their Jesuit Collaborators_

[http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-
their-...](http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-jesuit-
collaborators/)

------
scoj
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.

------
willvarfar
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?

~~~
rpenm
A response to a similar question on Quora ([https://www.quora.com/Tom-
Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Pat...](https://www.quora.com/Tom-
Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Patience-with-Quora)):

 _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.

------
b1tr0t
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.

~~~
benbreen
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.

------
vorg
> 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
>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.

------
pacofvf
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

------
arjn
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.

------
sanoli
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA)

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louisdefunes
Is Quora the new way to publish papers?

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

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fiatjaf
There isn't a way to measure scientific progress.

