posted
This doesn't really relate to the actual conversation going on in my other thread, so I just made a new one.
quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky:
quote:The so-called "Dark Ages" was a time of great discovery and growth in Europe.
What were some of these discoveries and growth? Are we talking primarily agricultural?
I don't know the period that well, but I was under the impression that most of the growth came from exposure to Muslims, who were the ones doing most of the discovery and who preserved the writings from Greek and Roman times.
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Also, from what I've read, at least in Spain, cleanliness and/or education (outside of the Church) put one at risk for being accused to the Inquisition as being a secret Jew or Muslim.
This is mostly addressing your last point, Squick. Like I said, I know people with very specific (and often weird) knowledge of Medieval History and lifestyles. A good friend of mine is a Spanish History enthusiast, and has a degree in History. Here's his take on it:
The Inquisition only sought to root out Heresy. Heresy was considered when a convert to the religion or a born member of the religion was preforming practices or teaching doctrine that was contrary to typical Spanish Rite Catholicism. So if you were a Jew in Spain you were fine unless you converted to Christianity and continued your Jewish Practices.
As to the cleanliness and education -- Cleanliness was a big part of Spanish Life that they had inherited that from the Moors. Baths were common as were cleansing balms. However oblations or ritual cleansings could have been a tip off for the inquisition that you were reverting to your former ways.
As to education, Spain supported many secular colleges before the Inquisition and many people in Spain could read and write in Latin, Spanish, and Arabic. In fact education of all kinds were encouraged by the church in Spain. The Spanish church was responsible for the translation of the majority of the old Greek text into Latin and even vernaculars.
So the question comes down to what the Inquisition was. The Inquisition sought to keep people who had converted to Christianity from Backsliding. Admittedly some of these converts had been forced to convert by various kings. However in general even if you "converted" you could still practice in secret your birth religion. It was only when greedy or vengeful individuals started reporting other people to the inquisition as Heretics did things get out of hand. In many cases innocent people who had never uttered heresy or ever practiced another faith were interrogated by the Inquisition. The Inquisition did not burn witches and did not accept torture as testimony
The Inquisition is only truly damned by the fact that they kept meticulous records of their activities.
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posted
I said earlier that Medieval science and medicine, while very flawed and not as good as those of the Muslims (who after all had the ancient texts preserved), were on the right track for a lot of things. There were significant agricultural improvements that increased food supply and allowed the population to increase, and Humorist ideas in Medieval medicine that became common knowledge in Elizabethan England still last in diminished form to this day.
My point, as a Medievalist and defender of the Middle Ages, was that the idea that the "Dark Ages" were so backward that unwashed people believed the earth was flat while eating rotten food, and the Church stifled any serious scientific discovery, is an idea that came about in Victorian times and is in fact false.
We always like to think we're better off than we were in the past, when in reality, human nature, creativity, ambition, and discovery are not something limited to our 'enlightened' time.
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posted
Okay, so there were agriculture improvements, and a system of medicine that was wrong, but sorta got the job done. I still don't see how that implies that "The so-called 'Dark Ages' was a time of great discovery and growth in Europe." Maybe you can make the case that everything wasn't all backward. But nothing you've said suggests that there was any level of discovery and growth equivalent to, say, the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world or basically everything that followed in Europe after the Middle Ages.
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posted
sarmup, Could your firend recommend some source that I can look into with. That disagrees, pretty drastically, with what I have previously read, but I haven't taken any sort of systematic approach.
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edit: Also, the wikipedia article seems to be greatly at odds with what your friend wrote.
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posted
I think a threefold distinction is required:
a) What the Inquisition was legally allowed to do b) What the Inquisition really did c) What the secular authorities in Spain did, with and without religious motivation and excuse, separate from the Inquisition.
I believe sarmup's friend addresses only the first.
I also think a distinction between science and technology is a good thing. Horse collars are a fine thing, but science they ain't. As for Humorism, it was invented by the Greeks, not any medieval person, and it has been utterly discredited anyway, which is very reasonable, since it was basically made up, like a lot of Greek 'science'. It's as much evidence of scientific progress during the Dark Ages as the four-elements theory of matter is.
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posted
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, KoM, but you're looking into the past with the all-too-clear view of one who knows exactly where the thinking is flawed. Within the context of the time period and place, it was something that made sense. As flawed as it was, it was an improvement over the earlier system of straight religious exercises to attempt to heal ailments. This at least showed an attempt at understanding the human body and its workings, building off of the ideas of the Greeks and Romans. Things that seem obvious *now* weren't so much then, but they laid a decent groundwork for later scientists to follow so that they could point out the flaws in the theory.
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quote:As flawed as it was, it was an improvement over the earlier system of straight religious exercises to attempt to heal ailments.
No it wasn't. Neither of them worked. If anything, humours were actively more harmful than prayer, since it led to the practice of bleeding people to let out the excess of whatever humour was thought to be causing the problem. Prayer at least only wasted a bit of time, and might have a placebo effect; those people really believed in prayer.
quote:This at least showed an attempt at understanding the human body and its workings, built off of the ideas of the Greeks and Romans.
Right enough. Ideas which were, as it happened, completely wrong and without any experimental foundation. This is not science, it is just formalised guessing. You could just as well argue that the prayers showed an attempt at understanding the universe and its workings, built on the ideas of Jesus. This is not high school: There are no points for hard work.
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posted
Let me make the point a different way: Going from one system of completely wrong guesses, to another system of completely wrong guess, is neither science nor progress. It's just treading water.
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posted
But, to put it into perspective, Islamic scholars were challenging the 4-humors theory as early as the 10th century and did things akin to real medicine in the early half of the 2nd millenium by departing from the idea of humors.
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posted
Fair enough; certainly there was a reasonable body of phenomenological medicine before there was a formalised science. But those scholars would have done just as well departing from the idea of prayers-as-cures. Once you start doing experiments, even in an unrigorous manner, it doesn't really matter what your starting theory was. (Within limits; medicine at the broken-bones and herbs-for-diarrhea level is well within those limits.)
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quote:As flawed as it was, it was an improvement over the earlier system of straight religious exercises to attempt to heal ailments.
While there were certainily strong religious components to, say, Greek or Roman medicine, that isn't the whole story. Galen was doing a lot of empirical work in the 2nd century CE, for example. Now, he got a lot of stuff wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that he was making a concerted effort to figure stuff out, and not just relying on Aesclepius-inspired dreams or something.
quote:This at least showed an attempt at understanding the human body and its workings, building off of the ideas of the Greeks and Romans.
In what ways did Medieval European medicine build off of Greek/Roman medicine? I know a bit about the latter, but almost nothing about the former.
[Edit--I mean, I know that Medieval European medicine was based off of Greek and Roman medicine--they practically worshipped Galen. What I don't know about is how they modified his theories; I'd been under the impression that they were almost slavishly devoted to what he'd written, going to far as to disregard evidence when it didn't fit with what he'd written.]
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posted
I'm finding myself wanting to defend Humouristic medicine, which is a side of the argument I really don't want to be on (because I know I'll lose ). I *agree* with everyone. The way it was described to me (granted, in a very informal setting) medieval medicine makes sense, but in very not-sense-making ways. If you have a cold, you have an overabundance of phlegm in your system, and you fight it with heat and choleric foods (chicken soup, anyone?), thereby striving for a balance in your system. Bloodletting is probably the most infamous, dangerous and least-informed aspect of the theory, and showed fundamental lack of knowledge in the idea, but using that aspect as representative of the entire theory isn't getting the entire picture. The combinations people would come up with (certain foods came to be prescriptions for one humor imbalance or another by the end of the period) worked often enough for the theory to be considered effective, but not always for the reasons they thought.
On an individual scale it seems that people weren't idiots, or willingly ignorant, but more often than not it seemed to play on a common sense approach to treating people. I'm a big fan of medieval food research, and a lot of the commentaries on medieval recipes have fun little tidbits on various dishes, like how feasts were often concluded with unsweetened baked apples or pears because they were thought to have medicinal properties. Was it because they actually provided a balance to humours in one's system -- absolutely not. But it's considered healthy now to consume such things, so it would potentially provide a little more balance to one's diet and system anyway. Honestly, if people were dying left and right as a result of humorous medicine ( ), it wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it did.
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posted
You are confusing phenomenology, theory, and science. Look you: To whatever extent people knew that herb X is good for illness Y, they were clearly on to something. But to the extent that they went on to explain "Because it reduces humour Z", they were doing something worse than useless; because when they then went on to say "and since humour Z also causes problem A, we should prescribe X for A", oops, that was wrong. Phenomenology is a fine thing, but it is not science; and a theory that generates wrong predictions, and is not tested systematically enough to discard or modify it, is neither science nor progress, it's just another set of dogmas.
Now, if you would like to show that the phenomenological part, "Herb X is good for illness Y", advanced during the period, that's a discussion that might be worth having. But humours are just a dead end.
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posted
i donnknow much about thi but didnt all major advancescome from the east rather than from european scientists
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posted
And any attempts I made to back out of this argument gracefully have failed utterly. You win. Here's a trophy. People were in fact willfully ignorant idiots who followed backwards dogmas because higher-ups told them so. For a thousand years.
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posted
More like ten thousand, actually, counting from the first agricultural civilisations to roughly 1600.
Generally, backing out gracefully involves some sort of acknowledgement that your argument was mistaken. Perhaps that's the bit that was missing from your attempts. Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
KoM, while I don't know the humorism is really worth arguing as valid, where do you draw the line as to what was and wasn't valid? Even early in the days of the budding of modern science a lot of what they did made little-no sense compared with a real rigorious scientific approach. For example, the concept of spontaneous generation was still around for a while because according to the limited knowledge and experimental approaches taken at the time it could have made sense.
Similarly, I'm betting there was something similar that spawned some of the humorologistic practices. Many barbers and the like probably thought that their treatments were doing some good, as far as they were aware. There wouldn't have been much in the way of statistical comparisons as to number of patients who went untreated and recovered vs those who were treated and recovered. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those medieval doctors would have been pretty confident that according to their recollection at least their treatments made a difference.
Heck, even bleeding did produce at least temporary reprieve from certain symptoms, even if in the long term it caused harm.
Basically, while in hindsight humorism is a load of horse manure it doesn't mean that at least on some level it wasn't based on what was believed to be real experimental results.
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posted
Well, that's just the point: There's a difference between anecdotal support and actual science. The beginning of science comes when people throw out all the old anecdotes and begin checking things systematically, not just "Try it once and see if it works". There was just as much evidence for the efficacy of prayer (to wit, "I prayed for granma, and she lived another two years") as there was for humours. Would you like to argue that miracles and nostrums were a precursor of scientific medicine?
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That is, he might argue that Christianity in Europe, and an appreciation of God and His works, led to rational study of just how His works, worked.
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posted
Bloodletting is a useful treatment under some circumstances. Some patients treated that way would have shown improvement, encouraging doctors to continue using the practice. Sounds relatively scientific to me.
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posted
Not at all related to this thread, but one of my fourth grade students is researching medieval torture for his final project. He has used this to threaten his older brother.
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posted
My argument was that discovery and science were not completely dead in the Middle Ages, which somehow found me defending the Spanish Inquisition and Humeric medicine.
someone says, "Middle Ages = teh SUCK!"
I say, "Not really. Here are a bunch of things people think about the Middle Ages that are wrong, that I found in five minutes of search on the Internet"
someone says, "But The Spanish Inquisition says people never bathed! You totally didn't expect that! <nevermind the fact that you're talking about something that in fact happened during the RENAISSANCE and was an exception to the rule, but hey>
I, knowing someone who's really into Christian/Mulsim/Jewish relations in Spanish History, go on the angle that it's probably not as bad as everyone thinks (You don't want to see the bibliography defending my friend's point of view (well, you probably do, but my point is it's long and rather exhaustive)), which somehow leads to me defending Humorist medicine. Go figure
My point still stands. Agricultural forward movements, the two-book accounting system, the printing press, the Magna Carta (everyone thinks we got democracy from the Greeks, when in fact it more resembles that of the Anglo-Saxons), the spinning wheel*, advances in military technology, etc. all show that discovery was not in fact dead in Medieval Europe. It may not seem like much to our enlightened eyes, but it provided some much-needed stability to the region, without which the Renaissance would have hardly been possible.
*Yes, it was invented by the Chinese and/or the Indians in about AD 800, but by the time it caught on in Europe in the 1200s the design had morphed (possibly to accommodate European spinning styles), and rather revolutionized the fiber industry in Europe, and the basic design was replicated *exactly* in the Industrial Revolution, except basically with motors involved.
posted
Let me recap the discussion. C3PO asserted that science prior to a vaguely specified period was in the hands of the church. Examples were asked for. Mendel was given, which is rather outside the time period C3PO was talking about. This discussion then petered out.
You then asserted that
quote:The so-called "Dark Ages" was a time of great discovery and growth in Europe.
You gave Aquinas, humeric medicine, and improvements in farming as examples.
(As an aside, just what is the adjective of 'humours' in the medical sense, anyway?)
Now, I don't see where anyone was making the assertion that "the Dark Ages = teh SUCK." Asking for examples of research conducted by the church does not assert that no advances existed. Then, if you wanted to argue for the non-SUCK-ness of a given period, choosing the theory of humours is a very bad way to go about it. Why not point to the advances in farming, which indeed were real? Humeric medicine looks quite a bit like grasping at any straw you can possibly reach, and weakens your whole argument.
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posted
I wasn't trying to defend Humour theory as a good theory, I was trying to defend the idea that intelligent, well-meaning people considered it to be a good theory. You argue for a scientific method that didn't quite exist yet, and you hold an entire group of people to a standard that was unattainable in their lifetimes. But whatever.
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posted
If we are discussing when science started, it is surely reasonable to hold people to the standard of science! When you are trying to measure effects on the actual real world which has living people in it, there are no points for a good try.
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posted
sarmup, I don't think anyone, besides KoM, is saying that these people were all stupid. I believe that there were complex reasons why the Middle Ages in Europe had so much less meaningful innovation and discovery than other places and times.
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
). I *agree* with everyone. The way it was described to me (granted, in a very informal setting) medieval medicine makes sense, but in very not-sense-making ways. If you have a cold, you have an overabundance of phlegm in your system, and you fight it with heat and choleric foods (chicken soup, anyone?), thereby striving for a balance in your system. Bloodletting is probably the most infamous, dangerous and least-informed aspect of the theory, and showed fundamental lack of knowledge in the idea, but using that aspect as representative of the entire theory isn't getting the entire picture. The combinations people would come up with (certain foods came to be prescriptions for one humor imbalance or another by the end of the period) worked often enough for the theory to be considered effective, but not always for the reasons they thought. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
), it wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it did.
