Another, small, book that I've enjoyed: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" (by saving old books in monasteries). They were able to save the books on the periphery of the Empire (which likely inspired Asimov's "Foundation" series), until they got rich enough to be worth raiding by the Vikings.
You might also enjoy "Caveman Chemistry" which traces the development of modern chemistry from knapping spear points (for which some kinds of rock are much better than others) and making fire by friction, to modern fertilizers and polymers. There's a narrative device, though, firmly rooted in alchemy.
Basically, the way that I use that phrase (which also I think is how most historians use it nowadays) is to refer to the period immediately after a large civilization collapses, when population and technology decline and there are few written records ("dark age" = "saeculum obscurum"). So after the Bronze Age Collapse you had the Greek Dark ages c. 1100-800 BC (with similar periods of decline and anarchy in Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Israel, etc.) And after Rome fell in the West you have a dark age from c. AD 500 to 800. And there are similar cycles in India and China and the Arab world. And I personally think that global civilization is heading toward another dark age in the mid-3rd millennium.
Obviously the idea that the "Middle Ages" writ large - from c. 500 to 1500 AD - was a "dark age" is nonsense; indeed from about AD 1000 onward their culture was superior to that of the Romans in practically every way. Even the various republics of renaissance Italy were more stable and granted civil rights to a bigger share of their inhabitants than the Roman Republic ever had. I'm sure that Marx and Engels would find a materialist/determinist explanation for all this, but as usual I would fault them for overlooking both the cycles of decline-fall-rebirth, and the unique spiritual and intellectual factors that caused medieval Europe to leapfrog ahead of the Arabic, Indian, and Chinese civilizations which until then had been far more sophisticated. (After all if you believe that history is linear, and that each stage in the dialectic inevitably brings to pass a different and better stage, then you can't explain the stagnation of the latter civilizations, or the unique social achievements made by Europe alone despite Europe being, until fairly recently, such a backwards place.)
Wonderful essay. You're right, people do forget all these things. It's very easy to, if one doesn't look into it.
If people want to have a fun time watching, there's a few series of historians living on the farms in different time periods. It shows some of how the monasteries were centers of the technology, and aided the surrounding farmsteads with what they had available - the monastery having the labor and capital to be a central location able to build and rent out higher end devices.
We've lost this - that there would be a central institution that would make such high end devices available to the masses at affordable rates, building a life around them. That it was religious in nature is also a key to note, as it kept the people focused on a spiritual and moral foundation. Unified. A polity.
A lot of things to ponder, as we wander through the life we find ourselves within.
Thank you for sharing these. It's certainly true that monasteries - especially Benedictine monasteries - are the main reason so much science and literature survived through Europe's Dark Ages. (Contrast this with the Greek Dark Ages after the fall of Mycenae, when nothing got through at all, and literacy itself was forgotten and had to be relearned from the Phoenicians.)
That said, it's important to remember that the monasteries weren't faultless, either - the monks were landlords, and as often as any other landlords, they paid no heed to Jesus' command to "lay not up treasures on Earth." Their peasants could be exploited ruthlessly - for instance, being forbidden to own handmills or uncastrated livestock, so they had to pay the monks heavy fees to mill their corn at the monastery's mill and mate their cows to the monastery's bull. And that was on top of giving the monks about half their crops. So when Henry VIII decided to dissolve the monasteries he often (though not always!) had enthusiastic support from nearby overworked peasants. Pride goeth before the fall, and all that.
As to your response - first, realize that I’m not one that ever has claimed that the institutions of the Church are without blame. Such an assertion is absurd on its face. That being said, the charges leveled against her are often overblown. Where they’re not, they often neglect to take into account what is lost in the abolition of the institution even just on the material side, let alone the spiritual.
For instance, I’ve had drastically different numbers cited over the years than 50%, closer to 10%. Also, the lands of the monasteries were used to bribe the nobility and pay off other individuals; often during revolutions the lower classes raise their voices for what is not theirs. Sometimes it is just, oftentimes not.
As to the control of the economy through mills and cows… You won’t be scandalizing me with the control of mills and cows. Humans have seen guilds, unions and other such control of labor as just through the ages. Large mills are a large investment and the select breeding of animals are both a common good as well as something to be done with thought and care. Now, was the particular use of it in those particular instances just and good? I am not saying that it was. I am saying that I’m not scandalized by it in theory, I can see why the people having to deal with it would not enjoy it, but I can see that it would still be good to do even if they didn’t enjoy it. The same as with union and guild labor - the people that want to break the union lines or the guild might not like it - but that doesn’t mean that the control of quality of labor, products, and prices is not a good thing.
This is something that is foreign to most Americans, that enjoy the pursuit of liberty in all things, and I take it yourself as well. And that’s fine. But realize that it is foreign to most humans to most of human history; and that the economies of those humans did fairly well, with more stability than ours for most of that time.
"This is something that is foreign to most Americans, that enjoy the pursuit of liberty in all things, and I take it yourself as well..."
Um, no. I am not a doctrinaire libertarian by any means; I'm generally in favor of protective tariffs, blue laws, public indecency laws, laws against some recreational drugs (but not weed)... I also have no desire to bring back the Lochner Era and I think America would be better off if there had never been a Lochner Era at all.
That said, since I'm not a Roman Catholic I don't feel any need to go out on a limb to defend the Catholic Church's record of political entanglements throughout the years... to put things short, I think it was neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but that should already be obvious. My basic idea about studying people in the past is that (1) They were almost certainly more intelligent and conscientious than modern pop culture gives them credit for, and one should do one's best to understand and respect them, and (2) their society also had serious flaws (otherwise it wouldn't have disappeared!) and we should try our best to understand and learn from them rather than downplaying them.
My apologies for assumptions on your stances. It was not something I ought to have done, but was something that was - from the article - seeming to be in line with the majority of American thought. I hope you can understand my mistake and accept my sincere apology.
"1) They were almost certainly more intelligent and conscientious than modern pop culture gives them credit for, and one should do one's best to understand and respect them"
I would whole heartedly agree with this. I think that they were a very complex and layered social and political environment that few appreciate.
The Monasteries of Britain were a unique creature, for instance. More land in Britain was dedicated to the Monasteries than any other geographic location. While they weren't originally Benedictine, the order came in and swept up, reforming many old monasteries that (from what I can gather) were either without an order or Irish; most of them not doing well. The Benedictines turned things around and raised the standards of living of the surrounding countryside in the process.
Then, having done so, there were legitimate grievances. I'm not saying there weren't. I'm not taking your numbers at face value, but I'm not rejecting them either - I'm honestly acknowledging that I've had lots of numbers thrown at me, and I suspect they're somewhere in the middle, on average.
Further, I am looking towards the reaction of the peasants to Henry in other areas besides the Monasteries when I make my judgement and state my opinion that I did above - that human greed, avarice, and envy are a large part of the overthrow of the Monasteries. Because, when you look at how the peasants treated the Catholic clergy that were priests, it tells a different story. They notoriously hid the priests, building bolt holes for them in their houses, sheltering them, and risking death and martyrdom.
This is not something that can be done as an individual. It is something that takes a community to hide, for a single snitch martyrs a whole family, if not multiple families.
Such dynamics explain both why all the bishops but one would go with Henry, why the Monasteries would be overthrown by grieving peasants, and why the peasants would still stand by the Church.
As such, like you say. I do what I can not to down play the legitimate grievances and errors of the Church. I acknowledge where She has gone astray. Like you said, I think that the era is more complicated than most acknowledge.
I think though, that the errors need not be the cause of the disappearance, but Men deciding that they're going to overthrow what is good. Was there error in the Garden? No. Everything God made was without error - He saw that it was Good. Some things fall simply because of human free will. Things can be bad - but not bad enough to fall, simply bad enough for a few men to cause them to unjustly because they, themselves, feel the need to throw the common good into disarray.
There's a difference there, as I'm sure you acknowledge, even if you disagree in this particular.
Anyways, to end, it is good sometimes to be able to read and laugh at such things. Have you read Rodger Lancelyn Green's "The Adventures of Robin Hood?" There's a scene in there where he ties up a disloyal, greedy, thieving bishop and forces him to say Mass for him and his band. Some Catholics may be scandalized by such. I'm not one of them, I laugh. When the hierarchy is not doing their jobs, the laity has more power than we moderns think that we have.
Tearing down the Church isn't one of them, though.
Another, small, book that I've enjoyed: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" (by saving old books in monasteries). They were able to save the books on the periphery of the Empire (which likely inspired Asimov's "Foundation" series), until they got rich enough to be worth raiding by the Vikings.
You might also enjoy "Caveman Chemistry" which traces the development of modern chemistry from knapping spear points (for which some kinds of rock are much better than others) and making fire by friction, to modern fertilizers and polymers. There's a narrative device, though, firmly rooted in alchemy.
If you enjoyed those books, you'll also enjoy Gimpel's "The medieval machine."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/800007.Medieval_Machine
Fascinating, and a thesis that Marx and Engels would have embraced, being a materialist interpretation of history (and not wrong for that reason).
Readers wanting more background on this very interesting subject should look at the Wikipedia entry on it:
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) ]
Oh yes, the controversy over "Dark Ages."
Basically, the way that I use that phrase (which also I think is how most historians use it nowadays) is to refer to the period immediately after a large civilization collapses, when population and technology decline and there are few written records ("dark age" = "saeculum obscurum"). So after the Bronze Age Collapse you had the Greek Dark ages c. 1100-800 BC (with similar periods of decline and anarchy in Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Israel, etc.) And after Rome fell in the West you have a dark age from c. AD 500 to 800. And there are similar cycles in India and China and the Arab world. And I personally think that global civilization is heading toward another dark age in the mid-3rd millennium.
Obviously the idea that the "Middle Ages" writ large - from c. 500 to 1500 AD - was a "dark age" is nonsense; indeed from about AD 1000 onward their culture was superior to that of the Romans in practically every way. Even the various republics of renaissance Italy were more stable and granted civil rights to a bigger share of their inhabitants than the Roman Republic ever had. I'm sure that Marx and Engels would find a materialist/determinist explanation for all this, but as usual I would fault them for overlooking both the cycles of decline-fall-rebirth, and the unique spiritual and intellectual factors that caused medieval Europe to leapfrog ahead of the Arabic, Indian, and Chinese civilizations which until then had been far more sophisticated. (After all if you believe that history is linear, and that each stage in the dialectic inevitably brings to pass a different and better stage, then you can't explain the stagnation of the latter civilizations, or the unique social achievements made by Europe alone despite Europe being, until fairly recently, such a backwards place.)
Wonderful essay. You're right, people do forget all these things. It's very easy to, if one doesn't look into it.
If people want to have a fun time watching, there's a few series of historians living on the farms in different time periods. It shows some of how the monasteries were centers of the technology, and aided the surrounding farmsteads with what they had available - the monastery having the labor and capital to be a central location able to build and rent out higher end devices.
We've lost this - that there would be a central institution that would make such high end devices available to the masses at affordable rates, building a life around them. That it was religious in nature is also a key to note, as it kept the people focused on a spiritual and moral foundation. Unified. A polity.
A lot of things to ponder, as we wander through the life we find ourselves within.
https://www.amazon.com/Tudor-Monastery-Farm/dp/B08R6MFJ9Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Farm/dp/B0DNCFJMTZ/ref=sr_1_7?s=instant-video&sr=1-7
https://www.amazon.com/Edwardian-Farms/dp/B01903UDJA/ref=sr_1_8?s=instant-video&sr=1-8
Uncouth,
Thank you for sharing these. It's certainly true that monasteries - especially Benedictine monasteries - are the main reason so much science and literature survived through Europe's Dark Ages. (Contrast this with the Greek Dark Ages after the fall of Mycenae, when nothing got through at all, and literacy itself was forgotten and had to be relearned from the Phoenicians.)
That said, it's important to remember that the monasteries weren't faultless, either - the monks were landlords, and as often as any other landlords, they paid no heed to Jesus' command to "lay not up treasures on Earth." Their peasants could be exploited ruthlessly - for instance, being forbidden to own handmills or uncastrated livestock, so they had to pay the monks heavy fees to mill their corn at the monastery's mill and mate their cows to the monastery's bull. And that was on top of giving the monks about half their crops. So when Henry VIII decided to dissolve the monasteries he often (though not always!) had enthusiastic support from nearby overworked peasants. Pride goeth before the fall, and all that.
Sure thing.
As to your response - first, realize that I’m not one that ever has claimed that the institutions of the Church are without blame. Such an assertion is absurd on its face. That being said, the charges leveled against her are often overblown. Where they’re not, they often neglect to take into account what is lost in the abolition of the institution even just on the material side, let alone the spiritual.
For instance, I’ve had drastically different numbers cited over the years than 50%, closer to 10%. Also, the lands of the monasteries were used to bribe the nobility and pay off other individuals; often during revolutions the lower classes raise their voices for what is not theirs. Sometimes it is just, oftentimes not.
As to the control of the economy through mills and cows… You won’t be scandalizing me with the control of mills and cows. Humans have seen guilds, unions and other such control of labor as just through the ages. Large mills are a large investment and the select breeding of animals are both a common good as well as something to be done with thought and care. Now, was the particular use of it in those particular instances just and good? I am not saying that it was. I am saying that I’m not scandalized by it in theory, I can see why the people having to deal with it would not enjoy it, but I can see that it would still be good to do even if they didn’t enjoy it. The same as with union and guild labor - the people that want to break the union lines or the guild might not like it - but that doesn’t mean that the control of quality of labor, products, and prices is not a good thing.
This is something that is foreign to most Americans, that enjoy the pursuit of liberty in all things, and I take it yourself as well. And that’s fine. But realize that it is foreign to most humans to most of human history; and that the economies of those humans did fairly well, with more stability than ours for most of that time.
"This is something that is foreign to most Americans, that enjoy the pursuit of liberty in all things, and I take it yourself as well..."
Um, no. I am not a doctrinaire libertarian by any means; I'm generally in favor of protective tariffs, blue laws, public indecency laws, laws against some recreational drugs (but not weed)... I also have no desire to bring back the Lochner Era and I think America would be better off if there had never been a Lochner Era at all.
That said, since I'm not a Roman Catholic I don't feel any need to go out on a limb to defend the Catholic Church's record of political entanglements throughout the years... to put things short, I think it was neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but that should already be obvious. My basic idea about studying people in the past is that (1) They were almost certainly more intelligent and conscientious than modern pop culture gives them credit for, and one should do one's best to understand and respect them, and (2) their society also had serious flaws (otherwise it wouldn't have disappeared!) and we should try our best to understand and learn from them rather than downplaying them.
My apologies for assumptions on your stances. It was not something I ought to have done, but was something that was - from the article - seeming to be in line with the majority of American thought. I hope you can understand my mistake and accept my sincere apology.
"1) They were almost certainly more intelligent and conscientious than modern pop culture gives them credit for, and one should do one's best to understand and respect them"
I would whole heartedly agree with this. I think that they were a very complex and layered social and political environment that few appreciate.
The Monasteries of Britain were a unique creature, for instance. More land in Britain was dedicated to the Monasteries than any other geographic location. While they weren't originally Benedictine, the order came in and swept up, reforming many old monasteries that (from what I can gather) were either without an order or Irish; most of them not doing well. The Benedictines turned things around and raised the standards of living of the surrounding countryside in the process.
Then, having done so, there were legitimate grievances. I'm not saying there weren't. I'm not taking your numbers at face value, but I'm not rejecting them either - I'm honestly acknowledging that I've had lots of numbers thrown at me, and I suspect they're somewhere in the middle, on average.
Further, I am looking towards the reaction of the peasants to Henry in other areas besides the Monasteries when I make my judgement and state my opinion that I did above - that human greed, avarice, and envy are a large part of the overthrow of the Monasteries. Because, when you look at how the peasants treated the Catholic clergy that were priests, it tells a different story. They notoriously hid the priests, building bolt holes for them in their houses, sheltering them, and risking death and martyrdom.
This is not something that can be done as an individual. It is something that takes a community to hide, for a single snitch martyrs a whole family, if not multiple families.
Such dynamics explain both why all the bishops but one would go with Henry, why the Monasteries would be overthrown by grieving peasants, and why the peasants would still stand by the Church.
As such, like you say. I do what I can not to down play the legitimate grievances and errors of the Church. I acknowledge where She has gone astray. Like you said, I think that the era is more complicated than most acknowledge.
I think though, that the errors need not be the cause of the disappearance, but Men deciding that they're going to overthrow what is good. Was there error in the Garden? No. Everything God made was without error - He saw that it was Good. Some things fall simply because of human free will. Things can be bad - but not bad enough to fall, simply bad enough for a few men to cause them to unjustly because they, themselves, feel the need to throw the common good into disarray.
There's a difference there, as I'm sure you acknowledge, even if you disagree in this particular.
Anyways, to end, it is good sometimes to be able to read and laugh at such things. Have you read Rodger Lancelyn Green's "The Adventures of Robin Hood?" There's a scene in there where he ties up a disloyal, greedy, thieving bishop and forces him to say Mass for him and his band. Some Catholics may be scandalized by such. I'm not one of them, I laugh. When the hierarchy is not doing their jobs, the laity has more power than we moderns think that we have.
Tearing down the Church isn't one of them, though.
Well sh*t, 2 more books I need to read! Thanks for the recommendations!