In episode XIV of this series, we surveyed the final intellectual efforts within Europe to hold the knowledge accrued during antiquity upright for future generations in the work of such figures as Boethius (c. 480–524), Cassiodorus (c. 485–c. 585) and Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636). Efforts that were at least partially successful as that knowledge did not die out completely but took, so to speak, a rest for several centuries. Important to note, I wrote there in opposition to a widespread popular myth, propagated by many militant atheists, Christianity and Christians were not responsible for the decline and loss of classical learning in late antiquity. In fact, the opposite is true, what survived in Europe did so because it was conserved and copied in monastery libraries, which is where much of it was found by the manuscript hunters during the Renaissance.
As we have seen in the following six episode, following the decline of knowledge production within Europe, which reached a deep point in the seventh century, beginning in the eighth century the newly emerging Islamic culture originating in Western Asia took up the baton of knowledge production, first collecting, then translating, and finally analysing, commenting on, and expanding, not just the knowledge from European antiquity but also that from Persia, India, and even China.
We now turn back to Europe and the gradual reawakening of the acquisition of knowledge beginning in the eight and ninth centuries, which slowly gained momentum down to the twelfth century and the so-called Scientific Renaissance during which much of the knowledge acquired, analysed, expanded, and improved by the scholars of the Islamic period was translated back into Latin and became available again, or in some cases for the first time, to European scholars. I shall here only offer an outline sketch, as I have already dealt in detail with this process in my Renaissance Science series to which I will here supply links at the appropriate points.
Before moving on I will briefly mention three authors from the Early Middle Ages, that I didn’t mention earlier, whose books, whilst on a fairly low academic level kept the knowledge of and interest in the mathematic sciences throughout the medieval period.
The first is Martianus Capella, a Roman citizen of Madaura in North Africa, who was active in the early fifth century and who wrote De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury) a Neoplatonic, allegorical tale describing the seven liberal arts, trivium and quadrivium, who appear as the bridesmaids at the title’s wedding.
The seven liberal arts provided the backbone of the curriculum in the medieval cathedral schools and for the undergraduate degrees at the newly emerging universities in the High Middle Ages. This book was highly popular and very widely read, as can be attested by the, at least, two hundred and forty-one surviving manuscripts. It was first printed in Vincenza in 1499 and there was an edition published in in 1539 just four years before the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus.
There were numerous commentaries on the text by leading medieval scholars. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book is that Capella introduces a geo-heliocentric system, in the astronomy section, in which Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun which in turn with the remaining four planets orbits the Earth. This is the earliest known presentation of a geo-heliocentric system although Capella introduces in a way that seems to suggest that it was already known. He and his system get an honorary mention in De revolutionibus.
Our second is a near-contemporary of Capella’s, the Roman citizen, whose origins are unknown, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, usually referred to as Macrobius, whose Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis (Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) expounds a series of theories on the dream from a Neoplatonic background, on the mystic properties of the numbers, on the nature of the soul, on astronomy and on music. His commentary was essentially an encyclopaedic rendering of the Platonic interpretation of terrestrial and celestial science. Like Capella’s De nuptiis this work was widely read and commented on by medieval scholars.
We leave the fifth-century Roman Empire and travel to Britain in the seventh and eighth centuries, where we find the monk Bede (672/3–735) in the monastery of Jarrow. Known as the Venerable Bede (Beda Venerabilis), he is best known for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) written about 731. However, he also wrote an important text on measuring time, his De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time). The book covers basic cosmological topics before going on to calendrics and its main theme computus, the calculation of the dates of Easter and the other movable Church feast days.
The work of these three together with that of Boethius (c. 480–524), Cassiodorus (c. 485–c. 585), and Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), who I introduced in an earlier episode, meant that an awareness of the mathematical sciences was kept alive in the Early Middle Ages, although at a very low level, following the decline of the Roman Empire. This meant that when a higher level of learning and knowledge began to emerge in Europe later in the Middle Ages, there was a foundation on which to build.
The next step in the reintroduction of learning into Europe came when Karl der Große (742–814) (known as Charlemagne in English) had completed the conquest and unification of a very large part of Europe by the Franks. Although Karl himself was illiterate, he and his heir Louis the Pious (778–840) introduced an education programme for priest and increased the spread of Latin on the continent.
The programme was basically not scientific, it had, however, an element of the mathematical sciences, some mathematics, computus (calendrical calculations to determine the date of Easter), astrology and simple astronomy due to the presence of Alcuin of York (c. 735–804) as the leading scholar at Karl’s court in Aachen. Through Alcuin the mathematical work of the Venerable Bede (c. 673–735), who was also the teacher of Alcuin’s teacher, Ecgbert, Archbishop of York, flowed onto the European continent and became widely disseminated.
Karl’s Court had trade and diplomatic relations with the Islamic Empire, in particular with Abu Ja’far Harun ibn Muhammad al-Mahdi (c. 764–809), better known as Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid caliph, and there was almost certainly some mathematical influence there in the astrology and astronomy practiced in the Carolingian Empire.
In the eleventh century the three Ottos, Otto I (912–973), Otto II (955–983), and Otto III (980–1002), increased the levels of learning on the Imperial court and in the monasteries through contact with Byzantium. This renaissance acquired a strong mathematical influence through Otto the Third’s patronage of Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 946–1003). A patronage that would eventually lead to Gerbert becoming Pope Sylvester II. From his time living in Spain Gerbert introduced some of the basics of Islamic astronomy and mathematics into the rest of Europe.
You can read more about the Carolingian the Ottonian Renaissances here
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries two developments furthered and accelerated to growth in knowledge within Europe. On the one hand groups of students seeking advanced instruction and groups of teachers seeking students to instruct set up the first European universities. The Latin term universitas “being a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, corporation, etc.” These bodies became sanctioned by the Church and by local rulers and adopted the seven liberal arts, as propagated by the scholars of the early Middle ages, such as Boethius and Capella as their undergraduate curriculum. They developed three post graduate faculties, theology, law, and medicine.
The second development was that scholars began to travel to the areas dominated by Islamic culture to acquire and translate the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and their Islamic interpreters and commentators from Arabic into Latin, during what is know known as the Scientific Renaissance. Europe was now there where the Islamicate culture had been in the seventh century, with an education establishment and the material on which to build or better rebuild an academic and especially a scientific culture.
I have already written an extensive blog post on the Scientific Renaissance in my series Renaissance Science, and also one on the emergence of the medieval university, so I won’t repeat them here. Next time I shall be looking at medieval contributions to the development of some areas of physics.