Kingleonel

From my understanding it was the Muslim Moors in Spain that was the main reason for Europe's rebound.

Jake10

Even if books were saved, though, how many people were learning to read and write? For the most part, it was only the monks who learned. Aside from that, they were also the only ones trying to write new books. I'm sure they had the interests of the church in mind, but they deserve credit.

Even in terms of the Renaissance, we have to consider the motivation for much of the art, the number of people who learned in the churches, and the organization that took place because of the church.

Jake10

Well, this may be another factor, but once again religion played a role. The Moors failed to take France but they did very well in Spain. Having done that, they extended their cultural influence there, which the country learned and benefited from, but ultimately it was the Catholic church that prevailed there.

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dagul

The age of enlightenment was also the golden age of Christianity in Europe. The Pope use to participate and exercise in the military struggle of the continent and survived the possibility of being annihilated if it would not exercise military powers till the people realized that it was wrong for the religious people because they are dogmatic and it runs against progress, but the time it was thought of was the time that the Catholic Church was in power. So the protestants who successfully won the reformations are also responsible for the economic progress of Europe during the age of enlightenment after the birth of nations. the rationale of the freedom of religion in democracy in contemporary time is the work of Christian Europe. That fact is undeniably true juxtaposition with the Biblical teachings of Jesus about love written in the New Testament. That, used to be Europe, and the same modern Europe.

Young Guard

We have to thank you Christianity for saving historical events and texts written by monks and historians during the dark ages. Without them we won't have a clear understanding about the dark ages.

Kingleonel

During the 17th and 18th centuries, in the , many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason. For them the Middle Ages, or "Age of Faith", was therefore the polar opposite of the .[27] and , among others, were vocal in attacking the religiously dominated Middle Ages as a period of social regress, while in

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire

expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages".[28] Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself on the threshold of a "new age", was criticizing the centuries until his own time, so too were the Enlightenment writers criticizing the centuries until their own. These extended well after Petrarch's time, since religious domination and conflict were still common into the 17th century and beyond, albeit diminished in scope.
Consequently, an evolution had occurred in at least three ways. Petrarch's original metaphor of light versus dark had been expanded in time, implicitly at least. Even if the early humanists after him no longer saw themselves living in a dark age, their times were still not light enough for 18th-century writers who saw themselves as living in the real Age of Enlightenment, while the period covered by their own condemnation had been stretched to include what we now call times. Additionally, Petrarch's metaphor of darkness, which he used mainly to deplore what he saw as a lack of secular achievements, was sharpened to take on a more explicitly anti-religious and anti-clerical meaning.
In spite of this, the term "Middle Ages", used by Biondo and other early humanists after Petrarch, was the name in general use before the 18th century to denote the period until the Renaissance. The earliest recorded use of the English word "medieval" was in 1827. The concept of the Dark Ages was also in use, but by the 18th century, it tended to be confined to the earlier part of this medieval period. The earliest entry for a capitalised "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in 's History of Civilization in England in 1857.[1] Starting and ending dates varied: the Dark Ages were considered by some to start in 410, by others in 476 when there was no longer an emperor in Rome, and to end about 800, at the time of the Carolingian Renaissance under , or to extend through the rest of the 1st millennium.


Dark Ages (historiography) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Solidaire

Actually, the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment, were most of all a struggle to break free from the yoke of the Church. In this struggle between religion and science, the Renaissance was a tie; much of its breakthroughs were put under the wing of the Church, and a compromise was the outcome. The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason was a complete breakaway from the Spiritual, so much so that it went to the extreme, and Romanticism became necessary to restore the balance between spirit and logic.

It would be unfair, however, not to mention the role of the Church in preserving ancient scripts, both in Catholicism (especially in Ireland) and, even more, in Orthodoxy. The library of Constantinople was a vault of intellectual treasures, which was handed to the West after the fall of the city to the Ottomans and the flight of its scholars, mainly to Italy, where they fuelled the Renaissance. Ancient knowledge also seeped through to the West via the Arabs and the influences they received from Byzantium and Hellenic civilisation.

Louise C

in Medieval Schools, Nicholad Orme writes, with reference to Anglo Saxon England:

Most of what we hear about schooling in this period of English history relates to clergy, monks and nuns, and this may reflect real conditions. But there were certainly some educated laymen by the end of the seventh century. One likely example is Sigeberht, who became king of the East Angles in 630-1 after an exile in the Frankish kingdom that had included baptism. The school he established on his return, together with his later abdication and entry into a monastery, shows that he was in close touch with Latin culture.

Kings were special people, but it is clear that bishops and monasteries gave education to other laymen who did not become clerics or monks. Bede tells us that Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne( 635-51) had clerics and laymen in his household, all of whom he made to learn the psalms and read the scriptures. Noblemen entrusted theur sons to Wilfrid, the aristocratic bishop of York (669-78) for teaching, without a definite idea of what their adult career should be. He was seen as a suitable mentor for boys wishing to either serve God or to become warriors, and would commend the latter to the king for employment.

It is possible that education of a basic kind was available to lay people outside religious communities before 800. Royal and noble households were traditional places of education in the sense of raising boys and girls in the skills and behaviour required for adult life. Might some noble boys and girls also have learnt letters in royal or noble households before the time of King Alfred, the first king mentioned as providing for such learning?

Yaunâ

But I thought that the library of Constantinople was created by the state. The monks did a great work though, only in Agion Oros there were loads of ancient works, from tragedies to works of Aristotle etc.

Louise C

King Alfred was concerned about the decline in literacy that he perceived in his reign. He sought to counter this firstly by establishing more religious foundations. He established a monastery for men and an abbey for women, and his queen established one at Winchester. Nicholas Orme writes:

His second strategy centred on developing education in the royal household. Alfred's sons Edward and Aethelweard went to school there, as did his daughter Aelfthryth, various boys gathered by the king from among his nobility, and others of lesser birth. The pupils in the household learnt skills that included the reading of texts in Latin and English and the ability to write. Tutors were employed, perhaps both male and female, and Alfred himself took part in teaching reading. He assigned one eighth of his reveue tomthe cost of this 'school' as Asser termed it, but its history after his death is elusive.

The king's third strategy was to encourage reading and writing in English as well as, or instead of, Latin. This happened in the royal household school, where Edward and Aelfthryth are said to have learnt books in English, especially poetry, and Asser claimed that the practice spread elsewhere through the king's command that the sons and servants of his illiterate nobility should read to them in English. Alfred encouraged the making of translations from Latin, such as his own Pastoral Care, and the writing of history in English developed during his reign in the form of the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This linguistic strategy was the most successful of the three, because it built on tradition. The custom of writing in English appears to have been growing during the ninth century, the date of the earliest surviving charters and wills in the language. Producing such records in English may point to a wider demand for literary texts than Latin could satisfy, and to a growth of literacy in English that needs to be weighed alongside the alleged decline of Latin.