Interestingly i have just typed "dark ages in europe" into google scholar and got over 700,000 results, many of the listings are papers by serious academics.
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The Christian Dark Ages of Europe
- Thread starter sooda
- Start date
Interestingly i have just typed "dark ages in europe" into google scholar and got over 700,000 results, many of the listings are papers by serious academics.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Thanks for the correction.
However: The oldest existing, and continually operating educational institution in the world is the University of Karueein, founded in 859 AD in Fez, Morocco. -- https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-university
Also, the University of Bologna was dedicated to St. Peter--just saying.
Oops, I just saw your post #19, so ya beat me to da punch.
It is helpful to not be too narrow when considering history and to see what was going on elsewhere during the period in question.
leov
Well-Known Member
"By the time the first European university was established in Bologna in 1088, Nalanda had been providing higher education to thousands of students from Asian countries for more than six hundred years." fhttp://www.ancientpages.com/2015/08/24/nalanda-oldest-university-in-the-world-masterpiece-of-ancient-world/rom Asian countries for more than six hundred years."Thanks for the correction.
However: The oldest existing, and continually operating educational institution in the world is the University of Karueein, founded in 859 AD in Fez, Morocco. -- Oldest higher-learning institution, oldest university
Also, the University of Bologna was dedicated to St. Peter--just saying.
Oops, I just saw your post #19, so ya beat me to da punch.
sooda
Veteran Member
The link took me to casa garibaldi.
sooda
Veteran Member
Nalanda - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
Nalanda (IAST: Nālandā; /naːlən̪d̪aː/) was an ancient Mahavihara, a large and revered Buddhist monastery, in the ancient kingdom of Magadha (modern-day Bihar) in India.
The site is located about 95 kilometres (59 mi) southeast of Patna near the city of Bihar Sharif, and was a centre of learning from the fifth century CE to c. 1200 CE. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The highly formalized methods of Jain and Buddhist learning helped inspire the establishment of large teaching institutions such as Taxila, Nalanda, and Vikramashila
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
Nalanda (IAST: Nālandā; /naːlən̪d̪aː/) was an ancient Mahavihara, a large and revered Buddhist monastery, in the ancient kingdom of Magadha (modern-day Bihar) in India.
The site is located about 95 kilometres (59 mi) southeast of Patna near the city of Bihar Sharif, and was a centre of learning from the fifth century CE to c. 1200 CE. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The highly formalized methods of Jain and Buddhist learning helped inspire the establishment of large teaching institutions such as Taxila, Nalanda, and Vikramashila
leov
Well-Known Member
sooda
Veteran Member
I posted that. Don't you read these threads? Neither India nor Morocco are in Europe.
leov
Well-Known Member
Well, sorry I must have missed that.
exchemist
Veteran Member
Something wrong with the chronology.
The term "Dark Ages", which as Shiranui points out is now out of favour as it implies a false picture of civilisation at that time, was generally applied to the period immediately after the fall of the Western Roman empire, say up to 900AD. Citing events from 1600 is at least 500 years out.
But in any case, This is what Wiki has to say about the idea:
" As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 18th and 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the "Dark Ages" appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century),[6][7][8] and now scholars also reject its usage in this period.[9] The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.[10][11][12] The pejorative meaning remains in use,[1][2][13] typically in popular culture which often mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of unchecked violence and backwardness.[1"
I've attended Easter Mass at Charlemagne's octagonal chapel in Aachen, built in 800AD. It left me in no doubt this was a time of serious artistic and architectural accomplishment in Northern Europe.
sooda
Veteran Member
Well, for the most part is was 600 years of stagnation after the fall of the Roman Empire. Carolingian architecture?
Augustus
…
Only because very few people could speak Greek for a time.
The Church was later the biggest translator of Graeco-Arabic philosophy (and the biggest funder of astronomy, education, Greek philosophical ediucation, etc.)
See for example Toledo School of Translators - Wikipedia
historians have observed that Christian churches were for a crucial millennium leading patrons of natural philosophy and science, in that they supported theorizing, experimentation, observation, exploration, documentation, and publication.... one cannot recount the history of modern science without acknowledging the crucial importance of Christianity. Noah J Efron - in Galileo goes to jail
This is very dubious.
Pretty sure I have a scholarly article that explains why somewhere. iirc, there is no evidence it was anything other than a mosque for several centuries, will have a look for it tomorrow.
sooda
Veteran Member
The Toledo translators weren't until the 13th century. The Monasteries didn't translate Greek works or Arabic works... just scripture.
And that is by no means the fault of the Catholic Church. It's because the successors to the Romans were a bunch of Germanic tribes--Goths, Franks, Saxons, Franconians, etc. This was a set of people groups that had limited writing and placed little importance on the maintenance of the culture and traditions of the civilization they just got done overthrowing and conquering. The Germanic tribes didn't care about the arts or science; they were just focusing on how to overthrow the neighboring warlord. Once Western Europe was largely centralized under the rule of the Carolingians in the 8th and 9th centuries, that is when you start seeing architecture, arts, science and philosophy take off again, because now you have enough men to spare to become philosophers, artists, masons and architects, and innovate in their fields. In the Byzantine Empire, which was also an Orthodox Christian state, there were no Dark Ages, because you continued to have a stable, centralized empire with universities, schools and academies. (The Byzantines were in a long decline thanks to the relentless onslaught of the Muslim Caliphates, but that's a separate issue).
tl;dr, don't blame the Catholics for the poorly-named "Dark Ages". They did everything they could, and it was largely thanks to the Catholic Church that the decline was mitigated and that the new flourishing of science, arts and culture under the Carolingians was even possible. If you want to call the Early Medieval Period "dark", then blame the Germanic tribes who systematically destroyed much of Roman culture and civilization and then sat atop the ruins. The Catholic Church was the fix for that problem, not the cause.
sooda
Veteran Member
The stagnation lasted a long time. I think Monasteries took in travelers and educated boys to become archivists, they probably fed and ministered to the poor, but they weren't educating the poor serfs.
I am NOT an enemy of the Catholic church, but I can't sugar coat them either. They did a lot of cruel things to the Cathars, Templers, Joan of Arc.. The list gets REAL long.
Universal literacy is only possible in complex, centralized, somewhat peaceful and at least somewhat wealthy civilizations. We are talking of an age wherein the entire civilizational edifice of the western world had just collapsed. Wherein rampaging tribes and petty warfare were a constant and the few books that did exist were horribly expensive, handwritten and in languages unintelligible to most. In such conditions it would be ludicrous to expect widespread literacy. Most people could not read or write because few had the need or luxury to learn, not because the Church was conspiring to keep people uneducated.
Literacy, while nice to have, won't keep you and your village fed in the winter. Most people were too busy growing food.
Forget the world of the printing press, cheap paper and centralized states with public education programmes. Such things were an impossibility at that time.
History is complicated. I'm sorry that the medieval Church was not yet in touch with the sensibilities of our twenty-first century secular liberalism.
But here's the thing. No one was. The historical narrative that paints Catholic Church as having maintained a negative, millennium long stranglehold on the development of Western Europe is a product of Renaissance and Early Modern era propaganda. Yes, brutal and messy things happened. But that's human history for you. The world beyond the influence of the Catholic Church wasn't any nicer. For example, Emperor Wuzong's crackdown on Buddhism was just as intolerant as any crackdown orchestrated by the Catholic Church in regards to the Cathars and other various groups. The Catholic world was by no means unique in that regard.
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sooda
Veteran Member
Fair enough, however I don't think the Church had much to do with the Renaissance.
exchemist
Veteran Member
Well actually you have a point re the architecture. It was really the Capetians who got Gothic going, from around 1000 onward. But there is no arguing with the fact that Gothic architecture, directly sponsored by the rulers and the church, is one of the glories of European civilisation.
As is music. The development of intricate and subtle polyphonic music, a couple of centuries later (Josquin des Pres, Pierre de la Rue etc) in Flanders was also directly due to the church, for which it was written. This was the first flowering of the entire western musical tradition. (And it is highly sophisticated and very tricky to sing, as I know from personal experience).
sooda
Veteran Member
The church had its moments, but it sure did a lot of horrible things...
exchemist
Veteran Member
That would be impossible to deny.
But then so did the secular rulers of the era, and also the Romans in the supposedly comparatively "light" era that preceded the supposedly "dark" one.
In addition to architecture and music (and not forgetting the visual arts as well), the church was also the place where learning flourished, as the monks and clerks were the people that could write and had the books. The ancient universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, for example, were all religious foundations, dating from 1100-1300 or so.
It seems to me the portrayal of the church as being a negative influence, responsible for European civilisation going somehow "backwards" (in itself a Whig-view-of-history notion) is largely false.