Renaissance vs. Middle Ages Idea an Error

[Extollager]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/oct/22/conspiratorial-theory-renaissance/

Love it!

In the 1950s, Cambridge created the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature for C. S. Lewis, signaling the demise of the old idea of the Middle Ages (boo!) and the Renaissance (yay!) as being as distinct as darkness and dawn. Any literate person should read his inaugural lecture, "De Descriptione Temporum," in Selected Literary Essays (and online).

Now here's a new book arguing that the Middle Ages began with Rome's decline and lasted till the time of the French Revolution. That may be overstating the case, but how pleasing to see the cliched notion -- still a staple of TV documentary makers and pop novelists, I suppose -- criticized again.

So how about you? Still loyal to the old Great Divide between the superstition, hunger, ignorance, lawlessness, and bad sanitation of the medieval period and the Renaissance's restless questioning, discovery of science, and freedom? Or -- ?

 

[Extollager]

(sigh) Sent this without checking if fingers were obedient to brain. Could someone fix the spelling of "Renaissance"?

 

[BAYLOR]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/oct/22/conspiratorial-theory-renaissance/

Love it!

In the 1950s, Cambridge created the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature for C. S. Lewis, signaling the demise of the old idea of the Middle Ages (boo!) and the Renaissance (yay!) as being as distinct as darkness and dawn. Any literate person should read his inaugural lecture, "De Descriptione Temporum," in Selected Literary Essays (and online).

Now here's a new book arguing that the Middle Ages began with Rome's decline and lasted till the time of the French Revolution. That may be overstating the case, but how pleasing to see the cliched notion -- still a staple of TV documentary makers and pop novelists, I suppose -- criticized again.

So how about you? Still loyal to the old Great Divide between the superstition, hunger, ignorance, lawlessness, and bad sanitation of the medieval period and the Renaissance's restless questioning, discovery of science, and freedom? Or -- ?

Many of those those some problems and issues persisted during the Renaissance and for centuries afterwards.

 

[Roy1]

SF author Michael Flynn blogs and writes quite often on this subject. Here is one example. There are others on his site plus De Revolutione Scientarium In "Media Tempestas" was an article he had published in Analog. His novel Eifleheim is SF set in the time of the Black Death and well worth a read.

 

[Extollager]

novel Eifleheim is SF set in the time of the Black Death and well worth a read.

I'll have to give that a look.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

l Eifleheim is SF set in the time of the Black Death and well worth a read

Thanks. I must. I have the hardback on my shelf a few months... I read about 10 books a month, but not got to it yet.

Great Divide between the superstition, hunger, ignorance, lawlessness, and bad sanitation of the medieval period and the Renaissance's restless questioning, discovery of science, and freedom?

Yes, it's obviously nonsense. Because it depended where you were in society, your wealth and education.

Lawlessness always a bit relative.

Regarding superstition, hunger, ignorance and bad sanitation: Plenty of that in UK major cities till the Luftwaffe aided slum clearance. No idea what rest of Europe was like. Plenty of it world wide today too.

While church attendance is down and folk like Dawkins get headlines there is as much superstition as ever. Everything from weird religions to fake science and fake medicine.

Note there is a lot of late Victorian propaganda we have swallowed in terms of what earlier people believed, such as the Flat Earth Myth. Ages overlap.
The Neolithic overlaps the Bronze age by maybe 500 years. The "copper age" lasted 50 to 300 years depending on location (early Bronze age). There is huge overlap of Bronze and Iron age in Europe. Pockets of "Roman" technology and way of life persisted for maybe 500 years.
I'm old enough to remember visiting people using wells, outdoor toilet and even horses on the farm.
In 1948 about one fifth of UK households had no electricity, yet Electrical Age started in 1799. There was public Electric light and rich people with Electricity by 1890s. Radio Trucks were sent to South Africa before 1902 for 2nd Boer War. Mechanical TV demonstrated in 1898 and Electronic CRT based TV proposed in 1905 (not working till 1933 and public service started in HD in 1936, 405 lines is about 377 lines visible, which on a 9" screen is HD compared to 1080 on 42" TV). Public radio Broadcasts started 1921, though the technology was 20 years old. Most people used battery operated sets (crystal sets only for poorer folk with a good signal).

The "PC" existed from about 1975, IBM's version was obsolete tech when sales started in UK in 1981.

Steam age isn't the Victorians. It started gradually in late 17th century and along with water power helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, which started in mid to late 18th C, but has no single defining event. In a sense we are still partly in Steam age as most Electricity is via Steam. 1800s to 1920s was electrical Age, though electric hearing aid, phone, fax, Telegraph, typewriter, mechanical TV and CRT are all Victorian. Then 1920s, 1930s, 1940s we have start of Radio, TV, Radar (using 1936 TV tech), Electronic Computers. So since WWII we are in the Electronic Information age, with the only boundaries being start of personal individually owned computers in 1975 and Wide Area Networking / Email/ Internet from mid 1980s, though web sites came later (about 1992). Mobile Digital tech is now 30 years old and "smart phones" since 1998, though many people unaware of them till 2007 when cheaper data plans started to come in.

"The Renaissance" is a western European concept, a rose tinted historic romantic rear view. There was an acceleration of science, art, ideas, technology, facilitated perhaps by the printing press (but China had that much earlier). The better numbers and mathematics was thought by Europeans to be from the Arabs (hence Arabic Numerals and Al-gebra). Cypher cracking by letter frequency was an Arab invention, but the numbers and Mathematics was from India, and the Arabs knew this.

Mediaeval is also really a European rear view mirror of history. It's not got an exact time period or geographic area.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Here is one example.

Lovely stuff!

5 August 1609. In England, Thomas Harriot begins sketching the Moon using a look-glass, and in the fine tradition of English eccentrics meticulously records everything in his notebooks -- and never bothers to tell anyone.

http://tofspot.blogspot.ie/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-for.html

 

[Roy1]

Michael Flynn is very good. Here is a quote of a review from a website that may well be interesting to medievalists.

Michael Flynn's novella (the title of which means, Concerning the Scientific Revolution of the Middle Ages) appeared in the July/August edition of the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. By the kind auspices of the author, I've been able to read it and can only say it has been a long time since I enjoyed anything more.

Flynn is a noted science fiction author and shares my passion for the Middle Ages. His story is set in Paris during the late 1430s where John Buridan is the rector of the university. He has two precocious students - Nicole Oresme and Albert of Saxony. Of these seminal figures, historians know very little beyond the basic events of their lives and their highly technical works. Flynn fills in the details of their appearances and personalities, taking his lead from the fact that the three came from Picardy, Normany and Germany respectively. One day, William of Heytesbury, an Englishman and one of the Merton Calculators, comes to visit and the four of them decide to carry out Galileo's experiments on falling weights.

Two things made this a story come alive for me. The first is Flynn's skill as a writer. He uses the present tense throughout to convey a sense of immediacy and mines the humour inherent in the relationship between Buridan's two students. To some extent, any decent author could have done this, but Flynn's other achievement is nearly miraculous - he manages to transport the scientific revolution to the fourteenth century with almost no sense of anachronism. He can do this because he knows the minds of his protagonists and understands medieval natural philosophy. The anachronisms that remain are entirely deliberate and fashioned into a series of in-jokes. In comparison, I found The Name of the Rose deeply unsatisfying because Umberto Eco had no comprehension of medieval life and his main character was simply a cipher for the twentieth century vision of the Middle Ages. Flynn knows his stuff and so his own rewriting of history is far more convincing.

Thus, his novella is probably the best entry point to medieval natural philosophy I have read. It is also enormous fun and heartily recommended.

I'll add that if you get the chance to hear one of his talks at a US SF convention then take it.

 

[svalbard]

I think it has long being recognised that the 'Middle-Ages' began with the latter years of the Roman Empire and terms such as the 'Dark Ages' are now no longer in vogue.

I can relate to a number of Ray's points. I well remember my grandparents house only getting an indoor toilet in the early 80s. Electricity was rationed in Ireland during the 70s.

However I am always careful about revisionist historians. Sometimes they carry the zeal of a fanatic. There is a reason that the Black Death was so devastating in the 14th century and also previous and subsequent plagues. Europe was an awful place to live in back then compared to our time now.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I'm at section 5 of the TOF Galileo story. Great stuff

TOF pauses at this point on what is to Modern eyes a fascinating and paradoxical irony. In his Letter to Foscarini, Bellarmino shows himself to understand scientific proof better than Galileo. In his Letter to Castelli, Galileo shows himself to understand exegesis better than Bellarmino. Go figure.

But Galileo isn't authorised to interpret scripture at all.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Section 8, the Trial. http://tofspot.blogspot.ie/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-trial-and.html

The Congregation continues to entertain doubts not only on the appropriateness of deciding a complex question in natural philosophy using the authority of the Scripture -- something that was not allowed during the more enlightened Middle Ages -- but also on the justifications for the process in the first place.

EDIT
A wonderful series of articles.

Phew, the end! Nine blog posts!

In the Legend, the conflict was between Science and Religion. But in the History, the conflict was between two groups of scientists, with churchmen lined up on all sides. Copernicanism was supported by humanist literati and opposed by Aristotelian physicists; so it was a mixed bag all around.
Science does not take place in a bubble. International and domestic politics and individual personalities roil the pot as well. The mystery is not why Galileo failed to triumph – he didn’t have good evidence, made enemies of his friends, and stepped into a political minefield. The real mystery is why Kepler, who actually had the correct solution, constantly flew under the radar. A deviant Lutheran working in a Catholic monarchy, he pushed Copernicanism as strongly as Galileo; but no one hassled him over it. Too bad he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.

 

[Toby Frost]

As far as I can tell, our image of witch-hunting comes almost entirely from the Renaissance and later. That kind of totalitarian cycle of arrest-torture-implication-arrest seems to have really started then. Similarly, the really large-scale religious violence within Europe took place after the Middle Ages, although it had probably (inevitably?) been gearing itself up for centuries.

My own suspicion is that, with the exception of about 10% of the time for 10% of the population, the Renaissance was very much like the Middle Ages. The difference, as far as I can see, is that the things that happened in that 10% of 10% were the things that would eventually push Europe towards improvement.

Inevitably, I'm reminded of Jim Dixon's lecture on "Merrie England" at the end of Lucky Jim.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

It was at time of Galileo that there was the last papal pronouncement on witchcraft. It was worse in the Counter Reformation era to be a heretic. As is true today with Islam. They regard the Ba'hai as heretic Moslems, which is why they moved HQ from Iran to Haifa in Israel.

 

[Dave]

You have to give it to the Romans though, they were good at architecture and earthworks. Their arenas, barracks and the central heating in houses are masterfully built. We may have surpassed some of the other things (they never invented buttons!) but it wasn't until waggonways and canals that we built anything on a comparable scale again in the UK.

 

[BAYLOR]

You have to give it to the Romans though, they were good at architecture and earthworks. Their arenas, barracks and the central heating in houses are masterfully built. We may have surpassed some of the other things (they never invented buttons!) but it wasn't until waggonways and canals that we built anything on a comparable scale again in the UK.

The Pantheon commissioned by Hadrian was for centuries the largest free standing dome in europe. When the vandals sacked Rome , they came to the Pantheon were so awestruck by it that they left it standing.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

they never invented buttons!

Steve Jobs was obviously a Roman

 

[BAYLOR]

Steve Jobs was obviously a Roman

The Romans didn't invent the PC either.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The Romans didn't invent the PC

They did use a version of the abacus, copied from the Egyptians. Using stones instead of beads. Latin stone= calculi. We get calculus and Calculators from that.
Apple nor IBM invented PC. It was due to 4004 chip, Intel realised if it was externally programmed the same chip would suit their Japanese calculator customer and the US military Minuteman missile program
Gary Kidall added IBM 8" floppies invented to bootstrap microcode on IBM mainframe, a teletype (1930s Telex tech really) and the 8008 CPU to make the first "PC". Neither Intel nor DEC was interested so he setup Digital Research to sell CP/M. Later Bill Gates got a friend to port the free Portsmouth BASIC (a cut down ForTran for teaching) to CP/M. S100 based machines quickly changed to Intel 8080. Gates sold his Microsoft Basic to CP/M users and then ported it to 6502 for the Apple II (the Apple I was only ever a limited production prototype) and other 6502 and 6800 machines.
PCs had existed for years before Apple, and IBM was a good bit later with their already obsolete 8088, using a reverse engineered version of Digital Research CP/M 86 that Bill Gates/Microsoft hurriedly bought after they persuaded IBM to give them the contract for OS (IBM had better OS of their own for real 16 bit CPUs, the 8088/8086 was a pseudo 16 bit CPU from Intel. The 80286 (or possibly 80186 never in PCs) was intel's first real 16 bit CPU. Long after other real 16 bit CPUs. The Intel x86, MSDOS and IBM held back PC industry for 10 years.

 

[Dave]

In case it wasn't clear, I meant buttons for clothes - no buttonholes on Togas.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

no buttonholes on Togas.

And Celts had trousers + jackets while Romans had bed sheets (togas) and skirts etc. The Scottish and Irish Kilts for men are more recent.
Toggles and cord seem more robust than buttons.
I don't know what held their trousers up.

The Celts also had the large open hoop U to tuck the two edges in and pin through top.
http://www.celtic-designs.com/apply_celtic_cloakpin.html

The Romans had some flavour of brooch too for fastening instead of a button & hole.