'indeed, we are surprised by the complete absence of some of the fields of greatest medieval achievement - architecture, government and geography, languages.' are these not practical applications, technologies and crafts with their own practitioners: farmers, explorers, miners, masons, etc, many of whom would scarcely have had access to written materials or the skills to deal with them. i mean it's a different class of knowledge?
is science not a matter of approach, a methodology rather than the object of study?
Government and geography - that is, politics - have been subjects of philosophical reflection and treatment at a very high level of intellectual skill and acumen since the days of Plato if not earlier. They cannot be treated as a banausic concern. Architecture, in the Middle Ages, began and culminated in the building of churches, that is, it was a sacred discipline with highly formal, elaborate and profound concerns. And languages came to Western culture with an already elaborate and advanced doctrine of their own: both Icelandic and Irish produced, in the early days of Christianity and written culture, very impressive grammars, easily comparable to those that already existed and were known in Greek and Latin. Yet they never were translated or studied until the eighteenth century and the rise of comparative linguistics. The Middle Ages positively refused to take notice of some of the most amazing achievements of its own period in its image of knowledge: if music because music reproduces the order of the spheres and the singing of
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not only monks but merchants and lords, were constantly arguing about legal, political, geographical, commercial issues - everything that makes politics It seems 'all politics are local' has been around for a long time.
Well, they also discussed it at the highest levels. Dante wrote a famous treatise "about the Monarchy", and he was hardly the only one. The theory and practice of politics at all levels was a universal mediaeval concern.
This is great reading! (Took me a while to get caught up as I had a fantastic weekend getting dirty, soaking wet, and mud-splattered.) People of earlier or prehistoric eras were certainly not less intelligent than those of us in modern times, we have just had several thousand more years of recorded history to learn from. I've been out of college less than 30 years, yet when I was there no one had PCs or cell phones. Assuming things will always be the same is assuming that humans as a species and as individuals will stop learning and innovating.
Unfortunately the habit of what CS Lewis called "chronological snobbery" is deeply ingrained in modern thought. Look at the negative use of most terms concerning the past: "primitive", "Neanderthal", "stone age", "Cro-Magnon", even "bronze age". I'm afraid that I may occasionally have used one or two such terms myself.
On the cover of D.K. Brown's "Before the Ironclad", there is a reproduction of a painting of the Allied fleet at the Crimea. Most of the ships are wooden-walled with sail, but prominent in the foreground are three small, iron-hulled paddleboats with a gun (still a muzzle-loader in those days) at each end. Any of these three would be easy meat for the puniest destroyer or corvette in any modern navy, but back in 1857 that was the future - and everything else in the painting was already as good as obsolete.
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are these not practical applications, technologies and crafts with their own practitioners: farmers, explorers, miners, masons, etc, many of whom would scarcely have had access to written materials or the skills to deal with them. i mean it's a different class of knowledge?
is science not a matter of approach, a methodology rather than the object of study?
i enjoyed reading this btw.
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People of earlier or prehistoric eras were certainly not less intelligent than those of us in modern times, we have just had several thousand more years of recorded history to learn from. I've been out of college less than 30 years, yet when I was there no one had PCs or cell phones. Assuming things will always be the same is assuming that humans as a species and as individuals will stop learning and innovating.
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On the cover of D.K. Brown's "Before the Ironclad", there is a reproduction of a painting of the Allied fleet at the Crimea. Most of the ships are wooden-walled with sail, but prominent in the foreground are three small, iron-hulled paddleboats with a gun (still a muzzle-loader in those days) at each end. Any of these three would be easy meat for the puniest destroyer or corvette in any modern navy, but back in 1857 that was the future - and everything else in the painting was already as good as obsolete.
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