How Dark Were the Dark Ages?|5 Minute Video
Were the Middle Ages, likewise understood as the Dark Ages, characterized by injustice, lack of knowledge, and backwardness in locations like human rights, science, health, and the arts? Anthony Esolen, an English Literature teacher at Providence College, explains.
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Script:
No duration of history is more misunderstood or underappreciated than The Middle Ages, the 10 centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the start of the Renaissance in the 15th.
This is specifically real in between the year 1000, when international warming brought grapes to England and grain to the coasts of Greenland, doubling the population and reviving town life all throughout the Europe, and 1348, after the warming had actually ended and the Black Death showed up from the east.
Let’s take a closer take a look at these years. We’ll make an excellent start by eliminating some nonsense.
Individuals of the Middle Ages did not think the earth was flat. They knew it was round. The ancients stated it was round, the Fathers of the Church said it was round; they saw its shadow throughout an eclipse of the moon, and the shadow was round; they saw masts of ships sinking below the horizon– round!
More nonsense: the Middle Ages were cheerless. Quite the reverse! They were full of color, of events involving everybody in town; they created the carnival; they restored popular drama, which had lain dormant for a thousand years; whatever they did, whether it was fighting or sinning or repenting or falling in love, or taking a trip thousands of miles to Rome or to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher they did it with energy and gusto.
What do we owe to the Middle Ages?
How about the university? Middle ages male developed it. For the first time in the history of the world, you could go to Paris or Bologna or Padua or Oxford or Prague or Cologne and research study under masters of law, philosophy, faith, and medicine, and your degree– designating you as a doctor or a master– would hold good throughout Europe. It was a worldwide neighborhood of scholars. A young Thomas Aquinas, born in southern Italy at the beginning of the 13th century, would take a trip to Cologne to study approach under the philosopher-biologist Albert the Great, then to Paris where he taught theology and approach, then to Rome, and back to France– and this sort of thing was the rule amongst scholars, not the exception.
Middle ages man thought that God made the world as an ordered whole. Copernicus died in the 16th century, but he was a priest-astronomer at a Polish university established in the Middle Ages. He wasn’t even the very first man to recommend that the earth orbited the sun.
How about architecture? If the Middle Ages were ignorant and dark, how come ordinary people– masons, carpenters, painters, carvers, glazers– erected the most lovely and majestic buildings to grace the earth, the Gothic cathedrals? Without power tools, with wheels and winches and scaffolding and their bare hands, they built up lacework in stone and glass, flooding large interior areas with color and light; we have nothing to match their complexity and beauty.
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How Dark Were the Dark Ages? Were the Middle Ages, likewise known as the Dark Ages, defined by injustice, lack of knowledge, and backwardness in locations like human rights, science, health, and the arts? The people of the Middle Ages did not think the earth was flat. Copernicus died in the 16th century, but he was a priest-astronomer at a Polish university established in the Middle Ages. If the Middle Ages were oblivious and dark, how come regular individuals– masons, carpenters, painters, carvers, glazers– put up the most beautiful and majestic buildings to grace the earth, the Gothic cathedrals?