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by b1tr0t
4288 days ago
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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. |
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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.