When I was coming up historians taught us that Columbus showed the world was round.
Actually everybody knew the earth was round. Columbus’s contribution was to get the diameter wrong. He thought that Asia was closer than everybody said it was. They were right. He was wrong.
In our history texts there was a map that showed how the Middle Ages pictured the flat earth. That map was actually a part of the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. It was a map from Ancient Rome. Ancient Romans never sailed the oceans.
So this silly Roman map was produced to show how the Northern Europeans, the ones who knew where ICELAND was, thought the earth was flat.
Witch-burning is another thing blames on the Middle Ages. Actually the Malleus Mallifactorm was written in 1474, under the influence of the Renaissance.
Medicine also took a giant leap backwards during the Renaissance. The Roman doctor Galen’s nonsense was rediscovered and bleeding took over as a cure for disease.
Vikings didn’t GET scurvy. Scurvy was another Great Leap Forward from the Renaissance.
In decades of reading, I have yet to find one single ADVANCE of any kind that came as a result of the so-called Renaissance. In math, calculus was already very advanced in Northern Europe long before the Renaissance.
#1 by Antonio Fini on 03/15/2006 - 1:20 pm
Hey Bob, give my countrymen a break. We did build that famous tower that looks like its about to fall over.
As for Columbus, I think his life shows that in the grand scheme of things sheer boldness goes farther than mere intellectual brilliance. He died thinking he landed on the east coast of India. But no Columbus- no Plymouth Rock.
Incidentally, Galen was a Greek hired to keep the Emporer and his family healthy.
#2 by LibAnon on 03/15/2006 - 3:12 pm
“Scurvy was another Great Leap Forward from the Renaissance.”
LOL! Well, there go your Maoist admirers. The liberals are still here, though.
I think the Renaissance was more like the Cultural Revolution, myself.
I’ve seen interesting analyses that see the Renaissance as the culmination of the increasing influence of Islam on the West. It began with the cult of chivalry and the troubadour, imported from Islam by the Crusaders. The technological revolution that emerged from the Renaissance was the result of the rediscovery of algebra, the source of which is indicated by the fact that “algebra” is an Arabic word. Finally, the political event that marked the beginning of the Renaissance was the
Ottoman conquest Constantinople in 1453.
I don’t hold with this theory myself, but it is popular with many who don’t like the modern world
very much and who would therefore like to prove that it’s all due to Asiatic, anti-Western
influence. The most prominent supporters of this theory today are, of course, the neoconservatives.
#3 by kanefromsf on 03/15/2006 - 7:35 pm
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
#4 by Peter on 03/15/2006 - 10:54 pm
Bob,
After reading this, I have decided you would like very much Spengler’s Decline of the West. (If your German is still good, you can read it as Der Untergang des Abendlandes.) Spengler doesn’t think much of the Renaissance either since it was a temporary violation of the Faustian spirit of our ever-evolving civilization and a poor imitation of the classical; ever wonder why “Greek revival” never looked like anything the Greeks ever built?
The map you are talking about ultimately traces to the Persian era for whom it was a schematic of the realm celestial where lay Paradise. That is why it is divided into four quarters divided by the Euphrates (whose celestial counterpart bordered Paradise) and the Mediterranean.
By the way, the good Catalonian Columbus knew he was not going to run into Asia. He also may have known the world was bigger than he claimed. When he asked for his loan, he had to certify that there would be a reasonable return to Her Majesty’s bankers’ investment. Thus in his sales pitch he claimed that Asia, the land of wondrous spices, was a just a short ways straight over the ocean. (The Levantine religionists the bankers assigned to his crew eventually had him jailed and murdered.)
#5 by Elizabeth on 03/18/2006 - 12:39 pm
One of the spectacular archaeological finds in the Middle East is a mosaic of a
map of the world as of 300 A.D. or so. It was found on the floor of an ancient church.
It’s very similar to that map.
During the Renaissance and even much later, people put more trust in their neighborhood
midwife, their local barber, their apothecary, and the local herbwoman, than they did
in some doctor with fancy airs and papers — unless they had more money than sense.
Doctors had a deserved reputation for killing people. Unless they were very, very
good — and those could easily get reputations for having magical powers, like
Elizabeth I’s Dr. Dee.
I’ve had a doctor tell me that members of his profession could do little actual
good until antibiotics were invented.
If you get the opportunity, take a look at an early (pre-1800) version of the
Encyclopedia Brittanica or one of the antebellum home medical books. Most
people not only expected to fend for themselves and theirs in both sickness
and emergency, they made sure they accumulated the knowledge to do it with,
whether it was in a book, learned from a relative or a trusted neighbor,
or available from a local practitioner, such as a midwife, a barber (those
did basic surgery as well as haircutting), a herbwoman or an apothecary.