Scarlett 2de Schreef:
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> In de tijd van Romeinen 1 bezat het mensdom niet
> het wetenschapniveau van nu, dat moet je toch
> duidelijk zijn?. Overigens, buiten de wetenschap
> om is er ook nog de filosofie. Met filosofie moet
> je ook ter dege rekening houden als je de bijbel
> leest. Zo heeft ieder zijn eigen bronnen, eigen
> waarnemingen, eigen opvattingen (Voltaire b.v.
> heeft die dan ook over de Bijbel) en daaruit mag
> ieder zijn eigen conclusies trekken.
>
> Die van jou zijn denk ik totaal anders dan de
> mijne.
Dat mensen vroeger dommer waren is het fabeltje van de verlichting. Zie bijvoorbeeld hoe slim men was in de middeleeuwen (dark ages).
"The idea that Europe fell into the Dark Ages is a hoax originated by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals who were determined to assert the cultural superiority of their own time and who boosted their claim by denigrating previous centuries as—in the words of Voltaire—a time when 'barbarism, superstition, ignorance covered the face of the world'…Instead, during the so called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world."
Innovations in Production:
-Water mills including overshot wheels (“The Romans understood water power but could see no reason to exploit it, because there was no shortage of slaves to do needed tasks.”)
-Windmills
-Post mills (pivoting windmills)
-Water pumps powered by windmills (greatly increased agricultural production by pumping thousands of acres of water off of land in Belgium and the Netherlands)
-Mechanized manufacture of paper (“’Paper had traveled around the world, but no culture or civilization on its route had tried to mechanize its manufacture’ until medieval Europeans did so.”)
-The horse collar (horses could plow much faster than oxen)
-Iron horse shoes
-The modern plowshare rather than the scratch plow
-Innovations in fish farming (due to Catholic fast days)
-Dual-purpose fish pond/farmland (fish excrement as fertilizer)
-Three field system of crop rotation (as opposed to the 2 field system) resulting in 17% more use
-Treadle-powered loom
-Water-powered fulling machine
-Spinning wheel
-Metal-toothed carding machine
-Wheelbarrow
-Chimneys (as opposed to a hole in the roof or no ventilation at all)
-Eyeglasses (lengthening the time an adult can work in his lifetime and magnifiers allowing craftsmen to be more detailed)
-Clocks (built independently in China, but destroyed under the Mandarins until modern times)
-Church bells
-Improvements in cranes and hoists
-Advances in mining, smelting, and metalworking technology
-Improvements in seeds
Innovations in War:
-Heavy cavalry (larger bred horses, high pommel and cantle saddles, stirrups)
-Cannons ("The Chinese were the first to use an explosive powder, but they were content to use it only for fireworks and an incendiary… were very slow to develop cannons and then made little use of them, and also failed to apply this technology to individual firearms, in Europe the application to gunnery was immediate.")
–rapid spread of cannons due to technological crossover from church bell industry
-Sternpost rudder
-Drastically more inexpensive and less labor intensive method of shipbuilding
-Round ship or Cog (rather than galley ships which were flat on the bottom) enabling further venture into deeper waters, longer voyages, more cargo, such as cannons)
-Compass ("The claim that the magnetic compass reached Europe from China through the Muslim world is false. It was invented independently in both China and Europe… was primarily of interest for performing magical rites-the Chinese may not, in fact, have used this device aboard ships until long after Europeans were doing so. In contrast, soon after discovering the floating needle compass, medieval Europeans added the compass card and then the sight, which allowed mariners not only to know which way was north but to determine their precise heading. They could now set accurate courses in any direction.")
Innovations in Land Transportation:
“One of the most misleading claims about the decline of Europe into the Dark Ages concerns the neglect of the Roman roads…the Roman roads were too narrow for large wagons and in many places were far too steep for anything but foot traffic. In addition, the Romans often did not build bridges, relying on fords that could be crossed on foot but often were to deep and steep for carts and wagons…even the soldiers preferred to walk along the sides of the reads whenever possible…the Roman roads were often paved with stone and therefore were hard on legs and feet when dry, and every slippery when wet. Such roads were hard enough on an unshod horse’s hooves; they were very unsuitable for horses wearing iron shoes.”
-Wider roads and bridges suitable for wagons (“Not only rulers and municipal councils built roads and bridges; so too did religious houses, merchant guilds, and literally hundreds of private benefactors.”)
-Wagons with brakes and swiveling front axels (as opposed to Roman carts without either, pulled by slow oxen harnessed abreast rather than horses harnessed in columns)
-Horse harnesses in columns rather than abreast
-Round ship or Cog
Progress in High Culture:
Music:
-Polyphonic music rather than monophonic music
-Pipe organ
-Clavichord
-Harpsichord
-Violin
-Bass Fiddle
-“An adequate system of musical notation”
Art:
“Art historians now acknowledge that Romanesque architecture, sculpture, and painting were original and powerful in ways having nothing in common with Roman art.”
-So-called “Gothic” era
-Flying buttress
-Advancements in stained glass
-Oil paint
-The use of canvass rather than wood or plaster
Literature:
-Literary formation of English, French, Spanish, Italian, etc. by “medieval giants such as Dante, Chaucer, the nameless authors of the Chansons de Geste, and the monks who, beginning in the ninth century, devoted themselves to writing the lives of saints in French. Thus vernacular prose formulated and popularized. So much for Dark Age illiteracy and ignorance.”
Education:
-The founding of the University (“This Christian invention was quite unlike Chinese academies for training Mandarins or a Zen master’s school. The new universities were not primarily concerned with imparting the received wisdom…they did not settle for repeating the received wisdom of the Greeks but were fully prepared to criticize and correct the ancients.”)
Science:
“For generations, historians claimed that a Scientific Revolution began in the sixteenth century when Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system… the flowering of science in that era was the culmination of the gradual progress that had been made over the previous several centuries.”
-Jean Buriden “anticipated Newton’s First Law of Motion by proposing that space is a vacuum, and that once God had put the heavenly bodies in motion (“impressed an impetus on each”), their motion was ‘not decreased or corrupted afterwards because there was not inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which could be corruptive or repressive of that impetus.’ Buriden also suggested a next step leading to Copernicus’s model: that the earth turns on its axis.”
-Nicole d’Oresme answered the common arguments against Buriden’s theory of the earth rotating on its axis 1) that there wasn’t a constant and powerful wind from the east caused by the rotation of the earth in that direction, and 2) that when an arrow is shot straight into the air it does not fall well in front of or behind the shooter. He answered these two objections “There is no wind from the east because the motion of the earth is imparted to all objects on the earth or close by, including the atmosphere. That also answers the second objection: arrows shot into the air not only have vertical impetus imposed on them by the bow but also have horizontal impetus conferred on them by the turning earth.”
-Bishop Nicholas of Cusa argued, “’Whether man is on earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless center, and that all other things are in motion.’”
Excerpts from chapter 2 of “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success” by Rodney Stark
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