Old Books

In the Middle Ages (a fascinating period; I've just completed the three Teaching Company lecture series on the period) people considered that the most reliable authorities were old books. First the Bible, then the church fathers, and finally the ancient Greeks. By the beginning of the High Middle Ages, Jesus had been dead for a thousand years, and these "authoritative" books were very, very old indeed. The professor calls our attention to a paradigm shift: If he were to assign a ten-year-old book in one of his classes, his students would wonder why he was using an out-of-date text; but in the Middle Ages, a professor who assigned a book that was newer than a thousand years old would be criticized for ignoring the "real" authorities.

In the movie Chicago, the lawyer tells his table companions a story of a woman who finds her lover in bed with two other women. He tells her he's alone, and asks: "Are you going to believe what you see, or are you going to believe what I tell you?"

To us this is so preposterous it's funny. But in the Middle Ages, if what you saw conflicted with what you read in old books, you'd believe the books, without question. Thus Galileo got into trouble with the church, because he believed, and reported, what he saw with his eyes (through his telescope) rather than what was written in old books.

The old system began to break down during the Enlightenment, when people started cutting up cadavers and finding that what Galen (the ancient Greek physician) had written was wrong. Suddenly people started checking lots of stuff from old books against what they could see and measure in the real world. The paradigm shift was happening: What you could see and touch and measure was more to be believed than what you read in a thousand-year-old book.

Today, nobody would think of arguing that Aristotle is correct when he says something contrary to what science has shown, and a doctor who studied Galen to the exclusion of modern medical textbooks would flunk his exams; and I dare say our most ardent Biblical literalists would not want that doctor operating on their child.

Old books have been relegated to the arts, where we gladly leave reality behind, and to philosophy, which has always been nonsense, and so is unaffected by science. And yet, a small but vocal minority of Christians continues to insist that one old anthology, the Bible, is a greater authority than the evidence of our eyes.

Here's some unrelated Medieval trivia that I have not had a chance to fit into the trivia thread:

What two technological inventions in the Early Middle Ages made it possible for knights to fight the way they did (couching a lance under the arm and charging at people)? And what invention in the Late Middle Ages ended the primacy of knights in warfare?

 

The stirrup is one of the inventions that made knights possible. There is one other critical one.

The crossbow was not effective against knights. The invention that ended their primacy is something else.

 

Bingo!!! The longbow packed considerably more punch than a crossbow, had a greater reach, but most importantly, a crossbow took a long time to prime. A skilled longbowman could fire half a dozen arrows a minute.

Yes. Specifically the high-backed saddle. When a knight struck another, or a person on foot, with his lance, the recoil against the knight was tremendous. The high-backed saddle allowed him to take the force of the recoil and remain on his horse.